I grew up playing hockey.  My parents had me on the ice when I was two, and I have been playing ever since.  Growing up, winters were spent traveling every weekend throughout upstate New York, and weeknights were spent at practices in rinks that only had three solid walls, the forth being a tarp.

Grippen ice rink, the rink I grew up playing on that only had three solid walls. Sadly, it is now closed forever after the flood of 2006. Picture credit NOAA.gov

Summers were spent traveling from hockey camp to hockey camp, picking up new techniques, and learning edge control from a figure skating coach who emigrated from the USSR.  Once we were home in the summer my brother and I would break out the street hockey nets and start pickup games in front of our house.

Dr. Smushkin's springboards used to teach coordination and muscle control . Photo credit http://www.hockeyagility.com

It is safe to say hockey dominated my childhood.

The Transition

After high school I stopped playing competitively.  Now, twice a week I break out the equipment.  Pickup hockey is on Sunday night, and Tuesday is league night.  My league team won the championship last fall, yes I am a member of a championship team, a championship beer league team.

Transitioning from competitive hockey to a beer league can be jarring at first.  For one, no more contact.  The game completely changes when you know you are not going to be hit.  Secondly, the amount of ice I see in any given season is drastically less; there are no practices in a beer league.

There are a couple of upsides to playing in a beer league.  Since I know I’m not going to be hit anymore I participate in a lot more risky plays than I did in the past.  Fancy passes, dekes between the legs, having a little “fun” on the ice talking to the players on the other team, most of these things would have been a “no no” in competitive hockey.  Now, however, since nothing is really on the line every game is a fun game where I can go out and really enjoy playing for the sake of playing.

Plus, let’s not forget about the beer in the locker room after the game.  One really couldn’t call it a beer league if there wasn’t beer in the locker room after the game.

I’m not longer striving to be an athlete in hockey, but I am still out there enjoying the game I grew up playing.

The Athlete’s Mentality

Athlete’s practice day in day out, hit the gym, run on their off days, and are constantly preparing for their next game.  Beer league players pick up the equipment once or twice a week, enjoy a relaxing game, and get up the next morning and head into work.  For most of us we can no longer be athletes on the field, but we can each take our athletic mentality and apply it now where it counts the most, in the office.

Do you train and compete like an athlete in the office, or are you merely showing up, collecting a paycheck, and putting in a beer league performance?

To see if you are a beer leaguer or still working on making it to the pros ask yourself a few questions:

Do you read about your industry?

I feel reading is key to staying a head in software development, a topic I have touched on before in My Digital Reading List, http://benjaminhysell.com/archive/2009/01/my-digital-reading-list/.

• Athletes read about their industry in their spare time.
• Beer leaguers enjoy not knowing about what is happening outside of their cubical.

Do you try new techniques, software packages, and play with new hardware?

Our industry moves fast, staying on top of what others are doing, researching, and implementing is key to staying ahead of the curve.

• Athletes are always playing with the latest and greatest, they know when to stay with what works, or jump to newer technologies.
• Beer leaguers wait to be told what hardware and software they should use.

Do you try to learn about tools and techniques outside of your core field of competence?

There are a lot of other industries out there besides software development,

::I know I was shocked too when I heard this news, but there really is!::

…what can we learn from those industries and bring back to our own?  The restaurant industry has been working with and managing teams of people for decades, do they have tools or techniques we could then apply to software development?

• Athletes learn about other industries outside of their own to learn from them, and see how they would fit in with their primary fields.
• Beer leaguers have already found their set of tools and don’t want to know what others are doing.

One might not be able to “go pro” in their job, but who are you likely to want to hire, work with, start a startup with, given the chance?

Dr. Suess Plaque at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, California

A full tour of all of the statues can be found at http://www.drseussart.com/hotelgallery.html, sadly most of the plaques are not included in the picture tour.

If you can’t read the plaque in the picture, Wikipedia has you covered…

Bennett Cerf, Dr. Seuss’s publisher, wagered $50 that Seuss could not write a book using only fifty different words.[2][3] The bet came after Seuss completed The Cat in the Hat, which used 225 words.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_eggs_and_ham

Dr. Seuss created an American children’s classic on a bet where he was resource limited.  Dr. Seuss, in this instance, embodied the mantra of “doing more with less.”

This concept of “doing more with less” isn’t new in the field of computers, and is one of the mantras of 37signals.  A quick Google of 37signals more with less kicks up two great articles:

• Less as a competitive advantage: My 10 minutes at Web 2.0 – http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/less_as_a_competitive_advantage_my_10_minutes_at_web_20.php
• “Less is More” is Bullshit – http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/less_is_more_is_bullshit.php.

I’ll save you the trouble of a click through: “Less is More” implies that more is better. It’s not.  Less is less.  Less is just right.  Less is better.

I’ve tried this technique of “doing more with less” in how I manage my time and the tasks I would like to accomplish at home.  For example, before I would come home from work and have all the time in the world and a long list of things I would like to accomplish.  I would keep thinking to myself, “I’ll get to writing that blog post, or playing that new Xbox game, I have hours before I need to be in bed.”

The rub was since I thought I had hours upon hours of time on my hands I would wind up not focusing on any one particular task, get sucked into something on TV, and never accomplish anything.

Every morning I would wake up and ask myself, “Where did all of the time go?”

Thus, in an attempt to live the “less is more” mantra I have restricted the amount of time I allow myself to spend on any one given task at night.  I have restricted the amount of time I have to write, program, and play Xbox.  By restrict the amount of time I give myself to complete a task I actually spend my time more wisely, accomplishing more than if I just gave myself all of the time in the world.

::Well, I’ve been productive writing and programming, I’m not sure you can call my Xbox time “productive”.  However, now I actually finding myself playing my Xbox instead of it collecting dust under my TV.  Productive?  Microsoft might think so, my wife and dog are not so sure.::

The only thing keeping me from creating the next Green Eggs and Ham is to make a crazy bet with my publisher, which will happen, once I get a publisher.

The first stayed on my desk at home…

The second is living on my desk at work in a makeshift pond:

The last is living in my car:

Now no matter where I am I have a rubber ducky to talk things over with.

I want to thank my wife Vanessa for the rubber duckies, her continual support, and for taking the time to read my blog.

::Of course my mother may read this some day, smack me on the head, and say, “Of course you head a rubber ducky, his name was Sprinkles.  You played with him every time I gave you a bath…how dare you tell everyone you didn’t own a ducky!”  I swear, I have no recollection of said duck…but I digress::

I don’t believe I owned a rubber ducky growing up…however I read a post on Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.com/) about Rubber Ducky Programming that made me want to go buy one.

After thinking about it for a few days, I wanted to write a post about it, but now I can’t find the original post.  I did find an article that had a very similar feel to the original, http://lists.ethernal.org/oldarchives/cantlug-0211/msg00174.html

Paraphrasing from the article:

• Place a rubber ducky on your desk
• Anytime you want to implement a new idea, talk it over with the rubber ducky and get his take on the new idea.  The key here is talk it over out loud; listen to your own voice as you talk to the rubber ducky.
• If at any point in your explanation you find it difficult to explain your new idea, you can’t find the proper words to continue, or you lose yourself in your own explanation, pause, smile, and realize the rubber ducky has done his job.
• Thank the rubber ducky for a job well done.  Take a minute to schedule an appointment to take the rubber ducky out for a beer next week.

I have found if I talk over a new idea out loud with a co-worker I discover holes in the idea that I haven’t thought about.  Once I have discovered those holes I will often change my thinking, re-evaluate, or drop my idea.

The only rub with talking new ideas over with a co-worker is if I went sprinting into a co-workers office with a new idea every ten minutes, I might find myself sprinting head first into a closed door when I have my next great idea.

But if I talked over those ideas with my rubber ducky, out loud, maybe I could cut down on my head injuries…maybe I’ll even find my co-worker’s doors open again.

Try it out, not just with programming challenges, but with decisions on what new car to buy, what laptop to shop for, or what video game to pick up next.  You may find yourself becoming better able to develop and articulate your ideas to your co-workers after you have tried them out on your rubber ducky.