Ultimate on Noetic Nought

Catch of the Year Poll on Ultiworld: A pointless exercise

Thu, 07 Mar 2019 20:23:00 +0530

Ultiworld, a popular Ultimate related magazine did a poll for it’s “readers” to pick the Catch of the Year. I wouldn’t have noticed it normally, but this time around Pranav Rajan, a player from India, featured in it. A lot of people in the Indian Ultimate community tried to ensure the whole community took notice and voted in large numbers!

[…] we studied many hours of tape and solicited your submissions to create a list of 16 finalists. Over the next week, you the Ultiworld readers will have a chance to weigh in and select the Catch of the Year.

Studying all these hours of tape and picking some of the best catches seems like a great contribution to the Ultimate community. It gives these players a good platform of recognition and it also gives all of us people to look up to.

But, I find this whole exercise of popular voting quite pointless. What exactly is Ultiworld trying to achieve here? It seems like it is just a competition to see how much popularity and support each player can garner.

Perhaps unsurprising to those who have followed along with our brackets in the past, Pranav managed by far the most votes in the first round, buoyed by a continent’s worth of support. If past brackets are any indication, it will take massive domestic support to take the young Indian star down in this competition. Can Sovell-Fernandez muster it?

In one of the tighter matchups we’ve seen in this year’s competition, Pranav’s U24 World Championships snag captured 56% of the vote to surpass another young star in the making, Allyn Suzuki of California Current. With the margin always close, Suzuki led as late as with 18 hours to go, but Pranav saw a late surge to claim victory.

The poll is unauthenticated. People can vote multiple times, with simple cookie tweaking. Even if we are relying on people to vote in the “Spirit of the Game”, I don’t see what the community gains out of this exercise.

The players, who featured in the poll, themselves are left wondering if they deserved to win given the poll wasn’t fool-proof and given that humans with all their biases easily vote for players they know, or players from their country, etc.

Ultiworld gets lots of page views and the like. The link to the vote was shared with lots of people who probably hadn’t heard of Ultiworld before or don’t care to read it. May be they found a few new readers?

I would’ve liked the whole exercise a lot more if Ultiworld just stopped at picking the 8 or 16 top catches, and putting them all in a post. But, may be that wouldn’t have got so many page views!

I refuse to participate in any such future popularity contests. And I think we all should.

Thanks to Meghana Iyer for sharing her strong views on this Ultiworld poll and for reading a draft of this post. Thanks to Shantanu Choudhary for encouraging me to write this post.

Glue Highlight Reels

Wed, 06 Feb 2019 14:33:00 +0530

As a leader on my Ultimate team, I spend a lot of time talking to my team mates. I get to hear out their complaints, their joys and everything in between. All these conversations got me thinking about what makes someone feel like an integral part of the team, where they are making a meaningful contribution.

Metrics to measure contribution

How do we measure our contributions to the team. What do we look at, to tell ourselves and others, whether we have made a contribution or not? I’m still trying to make sense of this, but here are a few metrics I found.

Highlight or Debacle reels

A lot of us tend to remember things as highlight or debacle reels - we make stories out of these events. If you got that layout grab or D, you tend to remember it and that leaves you with a feeling of satisfaction. If you’ve more highlights to remember than the number of debacles, you feel like you made a positive contribution.

But, I think games are not as “eventful” as we think [citation needed!] – especially when a team is playing good Ultimate. When everyone is making good decisions and executing them well, the game is quite uneventful. The credit for the success is distributed over the team, rather than one or two individuals. Are we capable of identifying this, acknowledging it as a meaningful personal contribution?

Tiredness

When we are done with a day’s play, we only have a few moments stuck in our memory. What remains as a physical manifestation is how tired we are, physically and mentally. A lot of us tend to use this metric, probably even subconsciously.

But, with a big enough squad that is being rotated well, I’m not sure this is a good metric.

MVP awards

At the end of every game, teams have a spirit circle where they discuss each others’ play, and pick a player in the opposition who made a difference to the game - Most Valuable Player. Being identified the MVP is definitely one of the easiest things that is used as a metric for contribution. Only one person gets it in a game, and often, the same person gets it in a few matches over the course of a tournament.

Sure, the MVP played well, but what about the dozen others? If you weren’t the best player, doesn’t mean you didn’t make a difference. Would not being identified by the opposition make you forget those contributions? Is there something the team can do to help recognize and identify them?

Being Challenged

When a game was very challenging, win or loss, people tend to feel happy and satisfied about it.

Just being challenged to their limits seems to make people feel like they have contributed. Or may be just makes them forget about asking this question.

Contributing in other ways

If I’m not having a good day, or I’m injured, I don’t mind filling water bottles and taking it easy. If I’ve been able to alert someone from the sideline and they make a difference, that’s a contribution I’m making.

Better metrics

Stats

Stats might help in a small way. For instance, just using a rotating scheme for calling lines, a lot of the not-enough game time problems seemed to go away. Just being able to assure people that there’s a system in place to ensure they get enough game time, took their minds away from it.

The usual kinds of stats - scores, assists, drops, etc. - might actually only end-up reinforcing the outlook of highlight and debacle reels. But, it may help with triggering some faded memories, which might alter the story we make up from the events recorded.

I wonder, though, if there can be other kinds of metrics that might help bring out some of the “grind” aspects of the game, rather than events. These stats will be harder to collect, but would there be a way to reward someone on how well they made space for the next cutter, or how they shutdown the person they were defending and took them out of the game?

Culture

I am beginning to think the problem is primarily cultural. In a world where we care so much about the number of likes and retweets, I think it’s just hard to remember the “grind”.

Sarah Griffith shared an interesting idea that she calls Glue players - players who just do the basics right, and aren’t necessarily involved in spectacles like a layout D or a super difficult throw.

Matty’s shout outs are for glue plays - reliable fill cuts for big yards, or somebody who committed to fronting their matchup because that was the game plan even though it’s scary as heck to give that cutter the chance to go deep on you.

And anyone who has ever played for Matty knows that these shout outs are a coveted thing, because you know that what you’ve done was selfless and helped the team succeed, and that’s an honor.

Matty Tsang is a great coach who has some revolutionary ideas on how to play and coach Ultimate. I’m not surprised the idea of glue plays goes back to him.

But, as a team without a non-playing coach, I wonder how to bring about this culture of identifying and encouraging glue players. May be having a handful of players who make it their job to do this for a few weeks or months, will set the ball rolling.

Sarah has some advice on how to go about doing this in her article.

When you’re holding tryouts for your team, look for who is facilitating scores even if they’re not always catching them. Look for who’s eliminating their person from the offense with great positioning rather than bidding all over the place on D. Look for who shows up, and who you can count on. And then let other people know. Celebrate it. Glue playing is contagious - make people aware of when it’s happening by calling it out and focusing on it, instead of the glory plays.

The idea of “Glue highlights” replacing the (figurative) highlight reels seems like a very promising idea. I’d like to give this a shot, as a team!

Thanks to Tariq, Tejaa and Shantanu for being excited reading drafts of this post, and encouraging me to publish it.

2018 in Review

Thu, 17 Jan 2019 15:02:00 +0530

Here’s my review of 2018 - my first successful annual review. I remember wanting to do something like this, a couple of times before too. This time, I managed to get started and wrap it up!

I’ve been inspired to write one by a some reviews that I read this year – some of them do it every year.

Sher Minn’s visual retorospective
Nat’s month-wise review, with a review of 2018 goals and a bunch of goals for 2019.
Julia Evans has an annual review with a bunch of “conclusions” listing what worked in 2018.
James Clear answers three questions every year - what went well, what didn’t, and what were the learnings.
Sacha Chua’s reviews were one of the earliest reviews that I read, and they inspired so much awe! I may not be able to do as much quantified-self type posts as her, any time soon, but I love them!
Buster Benson does annual reviews on his birthday every year. He gives himself a motto to live-by, each year.

My review isn’t as systematic as any of these. But, I have some inspiring examples in front of me to aspire to. Hope this will start something that I can keep doing annually from now, if not more frequently.

I’ve divided my review into a few different areas - based mostly the time I have spent on them, how important I feel they are, and the extent of notes I have in those areas.

Work

I continue to work on RSR at Akvo.
The most challenging project was to wrangle a legacy permissions system that worked at an organization level to give some kind of user level permissions. The project was plagued with incomplete communication of requirements from our partners, failure to understand the complexity of the legacy code, and weird bugs manifesting in even weirder ways. We eventually delivered something, but I’m not at all happy with the solution, how long it took and how the whole project felt.
The company has been in a cost-cutting mode, and has been rethinking the way the products are positioned - transitioning more into a single solution/experience for our partners. This makes a lot of sense – the focus shifts from building tools to solving problems, which is great! But, I wasn’t particularly happy about how much RSR features in these conversations. Towards the end of the year, our team has managed to get more conversations going on involving RSR, but we need more.
A couple of friends asked me if I’d want to work for their companies, but I decided not to. But, these were opportunities to think more about what I want out of my job and the work I do. This is a work in progress.
I did some mentoring at one friend’s company, and got to know the team and their work pretty well.
I gave an interview at a company that I came across at PyCon which went horribly, partially because I didn’t prepare well and partially because of interview jitters. I was expecting a better interview experience from them, though, given how much I liked their team culture, etc.
I also happened to take my first ever front-end interviews, along with a team mate. I really liked how he led the interviews, and made the interview candidates feel comfortable. I learned a thing or two, including the fact that I don’t know a lot of things that people with a more structured and systematic approach to learning front-end development would know.
I didn’t attend too many events this year, like always. But, I really enjoyed PyCon - especially the Keynotes by Sidu Ponnappa and Armin Ronacher.

Side projects

I worked on a bunch of side-projects this year, some of them abandoned, some completed and found useful, some abandoned after the first version turned out to be not so useful. Most of the stuff was “webby”, and unsurprisingly a bunch of my side-projects were Ultimate related.

Zulip

I spent a quite a bit of my spare time between about March and September contributing to Zulip – mainly as a mentor on the zulip-terminal project, apart from some minor contributions around improving setting up of the dev environment for the zulip-server project. I also facilitated a Zulip sprint during PyCon at Hyderabad.

I also got to attend the Zulip India Summit! It was great to meet a whole bunch of Zulip contributors. I especially enjoyed the conversations with and the presentations by Tim and Greg, mostly around developer productivity.

I’m really impressed and inspired by the amount of care and effort that is put into stream-lining the process of contributing to the project, and the emphasis on developer productivity.

I played around with a little bit of React Native development, but wasn’t able to devote much time to it. I’d like to play around some more with it, this year.

Find Playo Venue

I wrote a simple map based tool to find the most suitably located Playo venue with good ratings, when some of my friends and I were playing a lot of badminton together. I still use it sometimes, but we’ve mostly figured out our “favorite” venues.

moditweetarchive

I built a site inspired by this Trump tweet archive for Modi’s tweets. I used Dash to build it, and it was quite fun, despite a few annoyances. This tweet archive, though, isn’t as interesting as the Trump archive, since the tweets are more calculated and strategic. But, a few things could be added to make it more useful.

The repo is private as of now, but I’m happy to share the code, if anyone is interested.

Blaggregator

I spent a couple of weekends maintaining Blaggregator. I updated Django to 1.11.x which is also something I did on Akvo RSR (my work project), later during the year. I also worked on making the crawl faster by handling dead blogs better, etc.

weblogviz

I tried to get started with learning some Rust, and as an exercise, I started building a tool to analyze Apache logs and show some useful stats.

Org-mode to Zulip helpers

I wrote some Emacs helpers to post to Zulip. I’m quite happy with being able to post longer messages from inside Emacs - this lets me retain a copy of things like my checkins or interesting links in my notes/journal file.

aradhana.org

I tried to help a friend of mine build a newer website for aradhana.org, and spent about a couple of days on it. But, there were other bigger problems which needed attention from my friends, and this site just fell by the wayside.

Abandoned projects

There are bunch of other projects that I’ve abandoned. I may end up spending some time looking into them, this year.

SOTG Calculator

I had the chance to look at the Spirit scoring sheets for a couple of tournaments, in the beginning of 2018, and was utterly disappointed. I always knew that it was a lot of work to get the top scores just a few minutes after the final game, but I found a lot more mistakes than I expected – a lot of them were easy to avoid with just a little automation.

To help improve the situation, I built a simple webapp to compute the scores from a Google Spread Sheet. Finding the initial adopters turned out to be very hard, despite the app making life a lot easier for people. It was disappointing to see people saying they didn’t have enough time to try the app, and instead chose to manually compute everything that the app could’ve done with a couple of clicks!

But, eventually it started to be pushed as the official tool starting this season, and has found a bunch of happy users.

Team RSVP

We used Whatsapp to co-ordinate team practices and to keep track of the players attending, etc. But, this started to get quite spammy, and it was a hassle to have other conversations on the group, while folks were calling in for a practice. It was a nightmare to have people call in for two different events at the same time.

To see if people were willing to switch away to something less spammy, a friend and I started with a simple RSVP app and most people seemed to not mind using it.

Unsurprisingly, the app eventually got a lot of features - to make it easy to manage team practices and team resources like photos and training material. It is being used regularly by the team, without too many problems.

As an after thought, may be we have an over-engineered solution, and just asking everyone to use (Google) Calender & Email would’ve worked.

Huddle magazine archive

The Huddle was a good Ultimate related magazine run by Ben & Andy a few years ago. They eventually stopped running it, and the archives disappeared from the original site but are available on the USA Ultimate website which is super hard to read! I wrote some code to scrape the site, and convert the articles into markdown posts and made a more readable version of the magazine here.

I tried to get in touch with Ben & Andy, to ask if they were interested to replace the “coming soon” message on the original site with these archives, but didn’t succeed. Posting it on Reddit and sharing it with my team got some people interested, and hopefully they keep using it.

vquiz

To help my team with understanding rules better, I built a light weight tool to easily create video based quizzes - embed video and ask related questions, use videos to show answers.

To build a question bank, I tried to get some people on the team to volunteer, but it didn’t really take off.

Ultimate Frisbee

2018 was filled with a lot of Ultimate - not just playing, but also thinking, talking and planning.

Our team had a couple of the best tournaments that we’ve since I’ve been playing with the team - not just in terms of the results but in how much fun we all seemed to have together.
I captained the team in a bunch of tournaments. I’m not sure how exactly I got to be the captain – I guess it was just stepping forward for a tournament and offering to spend the time and effort required. It was a great learning for me, and I’ve learned some things about people and leading them that I would’ve taken much longer to learn. I also think I did get better over the course of the year – I got more confident and the team also trusted me much more.
In the past, game time at tournaments has been a big concern. We experimented with a bunch of simple rotation systems – essentially just systems to keep track of how much each person has been playing, and trying to prevent too many imbalances. People were encouraged to bring forth their concerns and ideas during the games, rather than keep everything until the end of the tournament when it is not fixable until the next time!

We had the luxury of being able to try this since everyone on the team had more or less the same skill level, and everyone trusted the system. It helped take players’ minds off playing time, and helped them focus on actually making the most of the opportunities on the field. Most of the complaints about game-time seem to have gone away.
Communicating the reasoning behind a decision is as important as communicating the plan. Often, I’d hear surprising responses to a plan or just generally disappointing comments like how decisions were being made arbitrarily, when we were actually spending a lot of time and energy to try and make decisions. On most occasions, I felt the reason was the lack of an understanding of the reasons behind a decision.
Team communication was another tricky thing that I’ve had to wrestle with. The team still needs to find a balance between communicating over a WhatsApp group or discussing things in person, and the fact that most people are very busy to make in-person meetings with a good attendance happen. We are experimenting with a few things to see what works and what doesn’t.
At tournaments, having a positive environment where everyone is supportive and has each others’ back is the most important thing for me. Irrespective of how much practice we had together and what kind of strategies we practiced, just having a team where everyone is positive and helpful goes a long way.

On the other hand, this positivity is also such a fragile thing that needs to be carefully protected and nurtured. It’s very easy for one negative comment or thought to spread negativity and discontent like wild-fire.

I think as a captain, I should’ve strived harder to safe guarding and cultivating this positivity in the team.
Thanks to some discussions I had with my teammates, I spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to feel like a valued member of a team, and what it means to feel like you are contributing and making a difference. Being chosen an MVP during a game is external validation that you made a difference in a game, but only one or two people get that validation in each game. What about the rest of the dozen or so other people? How can we as a team recognize and acknowledge each others’ contributions to each point or game?

Some of these questions will continue to take up some of my mindspace this year, whether or not I continue to captain the team.

I also took up the role of UPAI’s Director of Technology (aka sys-admin) along with AK. It’s mostly been minor email or slack related change requests, and nothing more. But, it’s been fun to get to know some of the people in the Ultimate community a little better. I also helped organize the UPAI conference.

Writing

I wrote only 8 blog posts, but 6 of them in the second half of the year!
Some friends and I started a Writing Club in July, and it’s been going strong so far. It has not only helped me publish at least one blog post a month, but based on the responses I’ve received, I feel it has also improved the quality of my writing. A lot of credit goes to my friends who read initial drafts of my writing, and gave me really good suggestions on how to improve them.
My journaling and personal note taking improved slightly as compared to last year - I have more notes for 2018, than 2017. And that’s how I was able to write this review post. But, I think the notes are restricted to a few areas of my life, and I can take some actions to write about other things that are important too.

Relationships

I started a couple of Zulip instances with my friends on it – one with my college friends and another with my Ultimate team mates on it. My friends from college went back to WhatsApp, but the other Zulip realm has had some pretty conversations, especially on #beanbags. It hasn’t been super active towards the end of the year, but I’m really happy it exists, and hope it continues to grow this year.
It was good to have some more teammates turn into friends. Thanks to all the Ultimate stuff I’ve been doing, I got to spend a lot more time with some of the people that I previously hadn’t interacted much with.
Tarle, a teammate and friend, passed away. 4 months and he’s still dead. We all miss him a lot! But, we’ve also come together stronger, in some ways.
I’ve tried scheduling regular check-ins with some friends who live far away. They worked for a bit, but seem to be easily swallowed by higher priority things. When they did happen, though, they were quite nice!
Towards the end of the year, I moved houses. The new house is well furnished and has neighbors who mostly mind their business – I had a lot of friends and family visiting, which has been good.

2019 goals/ideas

I want to give having a motto for an year a shot, a la Buster Benson. My motto for 2019 is “Be Deliberate”.

I’m not sure I know exactly what this entails, and I’m sure I’ll get a better understanding of it, as the year goes by. But, here are few things that I think would be good starting points:

Choose what I read more deliberately, and read for understanding rather than just information. Keep better notes of the books I read.
Go back to using Howdy or creating check-ins with more people, and making sure that they happen. Prefer meeting in person or audio/video calls, rather than chat.
Journal more about feelings and thoughts, especially when making decisions, rather than just about events. Journal about more areas of my life rather than just “work” related stuff.
Consider hiring an editor to help write better blog posts, and improve writing style. Getting reviews and suggestions from my Writing Club friends has been good, but this would be a level up.
Look for mentors in other areas of life - especially those where I feel like I’m plateauing.
Pick side projects more carefully. One thing that I would be deliberately thinking more about would be working on side projects that pay.
Write quarterly posts to document my improved understanding of the theme – Be Deliberate – and to track progress I’m making on these goals.

Thanks Kartik Krovvidi and Shantanu Choudhary for reading drafts of this post, being excited about it, and useful suggestions to make it better.

Software development practices for sports teams

Sun, 23 Sep 2018 11:31:00 +0530

Motivation

A few weeks ago, I came across a talk on Mob programming — a technique for working on a software project as a team, that was accidentally discovered by a team trying to figure out how to work well together. The speaker lets us in on how they stumbled on it, and how they fine-tuned it to make it more effective while being relaxed and enjoyable.

A few days before that, I shared a post on “getting feedback (as a software developer)” with my Ultimate Frisbee team-mates and it seemed to resonate with them. I’m often looking at things happening in my sports team from a software guy’s perspective, since I spend a lot of time being the software guy. But, I rarely, if ever, directly share these thoughts and ideas with my team-mates.

But, the mob programming talk inspired me to make a conscious effort to look for software development patterns that could be adopted by our (sports) team.

Most players on our team have been playing Ultimate for a while now (2-5 years). So, we have more problems due to miscommunication and everyone not being on the same page, than we have due to lack of skills or knowledge. When someone on the team does not understand the plan, the whole plan goes for a toss.

How do we make sure that everyone understands what the team is trying to do and is able to contribute their bit to the team’s plans and success? How do we make playing with each other as enjoyable as it can be?

“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” — Robert Henri

Some ideas for adoption

Here are some ideas that, I think, could be adopted by our team. Some of these are things that teams, including ours, do in some shape or form. But, identifying and naming would make it easier for people to talk about them and develop a common understanding of why and how to do them.

Ubiquitous Language

Eric Evans, in his book Domain Driven Design, talks about building a Ubiquitous language in the team. It grows as the team’s understanding of the problem grows, and helps the team communicate clearly throughout the development cycle.

Our team plays a lot of zone defense, and it usually works well for us But, it wasn’t working particularly well, during one of the tournaments last year. Luckily, we had Moby playing with us, and he asked us some probing questions around the objective of the play and the roles of each of the players. With just a short chat and a few small adjustments, the zone became way more effective. Essentially, we built a common understanding of the objective of the defense and brought everyone onto the same page.

Ultimate teams use a lot of lingo – a lot. New players just pick it up by osmosis, at practice, from the senior folks. This works most of the time, except when it doesn’t. Each person on the team has a slightly different understanding of what a term means, and the difference is sometimes big enough to cause a plan to fail due to miscommunication. Spending time building a common understanding would make the team communicate and operate more effectively. Practicing game scenarios is essentially a way of doing this, but it would be worth thinking about and discussing the terms and the language being used.

Off-field lingo should also be clarified using a similar process – for instance, what does “good sideline support” mean? What does giving or not giving “feedback on the field” mean?

Sprints

Agile development recommends continuous development of software. Often software teams use 2-4 week development cycles, called sprints. For each sprint, the team sets itself a goal, and the whole team prioritizes tasks and makes decisions in-line with this goal.

Sports teams would also benefit from sprints – short and focused practice cycles, where everyone on the team is aware of the team’s goal. This would make it much easier for players to help each other out. Also, players can align their individual goals with the team goal, making practices much more effective.

Retrospectives

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly. — The Agile Manifesto

Most Ultimate teams do some kind of post-practice retrospectives, though, they don’t call it that. These retrospectives are a discussion of the good, bad and the ugly. Usually, no conscious decisions are made about what practices are working well for the team, and what should be taken forward to upcoming ones.

Slightly longer term retrospectives would be quite useful too. If a team adopts the idea of sprints, each new sprint should start with a retrospective of the last one and planning for the next.

A retrospective’s participants are expected to follow the prime directive.

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand. — Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review

Internalising this would be really helpful especially during post-tournament retrospectives, where emotions can run high – it would keep the discussion positive and focused on identifying problems and finding solutions, rather than spiraling into blame games, defensive arguments, etc.

Daily Stand-ups

Agile teams gather each day at the start of the work-day, to let each know about the progress of the work-items. The team tries to help each other get rid of the impediments to progress.

Ultimate teams could also benefit operating in this style – everyone shares with each other what they are working on, and the problems in their learning. This would make it easier for others to look out for things to help with. Team-mates would limit themselves to giving feedback to the thing that a player is working on.

Players setting themselves a small number of clear focus points would also force them to consciously think about and work on their game more effectively.

Face-to-face communication

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. — The Agile Manifesto

As our team has grown larger over the years, more and more communication has moved to the WhatsApp group. Keeping everyone informed via face-to-face communication, at this team size needs a lot of co-ordination and planning, and the time at practice is considered to be too precious to be spent talking and not practicing.

But, clearly WhatsApp doesn’t seem like the best medium to have discussions. Discussions rarely, if ever, happen on our groups. It often just seems to be information dissemination. Using a better communication tool could mitigate a few of these problems, but face-to-face discussions have other benefits. They bring about a greater sense of belonging to the team and increase buy-in into the team’s plans.

Unit tests vs. Integration tests

Practice games are helpful to gauge if a team is playing well together and if its plans are working. This seems analogous to integration tests — checking that we have functional software, end-to-end.

But, in the early stages of development, it’s common to write unit-tests – tests to ensure that each of the individual components works well in isolation. An analogous thing would be to have individual evaluations to help players identify weak areas, and to measure progress in those areas. It would also prevent players from slipping on important “indicators”.

Other ideas to think about

Some ideas that I find interesting, but don’t yet know if and how they can be adopted by sports teams are below.

Mob programming

In a mob programming session, everyone on the team is working on the same computer, in the same room, at the same time. This seems tremendously ineffective at the face of it, but turns out to be a good way to produce high quality software, quickly.

Hammock driven development

Bugs are incredibly expensive to be found and fixed in production software. They are cheaper to fix in the development phase. But, the design phase is the best place to fix them.

Rich Hickey recommends feeding a lot of information about the problem you are trying to solve to your waking mind, so that your background mind can feed off of it while you are asleep, and make useful connections.

Conclusion

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. — The Agile manifesto

This sounds exactly like what players in our team need too. The captains and the mentors in the team should work towards providing the environment and the support everyone on the team needs, and trust them to do the job.

Thanks Meghana Iyer, Ravitheja Tetali, Shantanu Choudhary, Vandith PSR, Varun Rangarajan and Vivek Krishnaswamy for reading drafts of this post and giving helpful suggestions.

Scraping Google Groups

Tue, 31 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0530

I was playing around with a few ideas for creating a timeline for the mumbai ultimate group, and as a part of playing around with stuff, for that idea, I ended up wanting to scrape all the emails on our google group. After looking around a little bit, I failed to find anything that claims to be able to do this.

So I ended up writing my own hacky script to download all the emails sent on the group. Like I said, this is a hack and can be improved quite a bit, but I am not inclined to do anything about it, right now. Since, everything about google groups is ajaxy, this script uses selenium and does things on the page, that one would do by hand. It’s not something that I am proud of, but it does the job!

Surat Ultimate Open

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0530

About 20 of us, gathered at Andheri Station, to leave for Surat. I was the only one playing in his/her first tournament, and it was exciting to be a part of a squad, going to a tournament. A first in my life. We had two teams, A and B, or better known as Storm and Chasers. I was playing for the Chasers team. The train journey was pretty uneventful for me, unfortunately so, because of a mixed up ticket booking and only 4 of us, sitting in the AC coach. I ended up reading or sleeping for most part of the journey. I didn’t realize, we could just walk into the other coach where most of the others were having a lot of fun!

Fountainhead School was the venue for the tournament, and they had arranged for transport, accommodation and food and drinks, all through the tournament. The organization for the tournament was pretty good, I must say! We had a bus pick us up at the railway station, and getting into the bus felt like we were some big team with our own team bus, and stuff (though, there was also the Silent Voice team on the bus ;). Ganesh and I had a little chat in the bus, and he was recollecting his experiences in his first tournament, and was asking me what I expected from the tournament, and I didn’t really have a good answer, because I was too excited. But, I really enjoyed the chat with him.

We all crashed at the school library for the night, for a hard day in the field on the next day. We rushed to the field, early next morning, about half a km of walk from the school, the playing field was in the middle of some fields and we warmed up to a lovely sun rise. Storm had their first game at 7, against Dream Catchers, and they started a little rusty in the first half, but came back strongly in the second one to beat them 11-7. This was going to be closest their opposition was going to come to winning! Chasers had their first game against Silent Voice, a team from Ahmedabad. We got together as a team for the first time, really, and having just one substitute player didn’t really help much. We got thrashed by Silent voice, 11-4 or 11-5. Chasers got the next game as a bye, since Lay Lapak failed to turn up for the tournament and this meant we slid up the table and got to play the Dream Catchers from Ahmedabad. Craig reached in time, from Mumbai, for this game, and we gave them a decent fight in this game, though the score line didn’t really suggest it. We were doing way too many mistakes (and repeating them!) near the end-zones and they were costing us a lot. The highlight of these games, though, was the spectacular layouts by Cheerag on D. Storm, meanwhile, thrashed the HAT team 11-0, and beat Surat Trailblazers convincingly.

A lot of the teams had school kids on them, who were playing astonishingly well. The pick out of those was Jumbish, which had 10 to 15 year olds, jumping all over the place and giving their opposition a run for their money. The moment of the tournament for me was a catch by a Jumbish player, who jumped ahead of him, to take a catch, flipped over in the air without placing his hands on to the ground, and landed on his feet and made a perfectly nice pass to his team-mate! Exciting stuff to watch! Pune also has a nice Ultimate program for kids, and their team Royal Spirits was playing some good Ultimate.

The last game of the day was Storm vs. Flying Spirits from Pune, who were second on the points table, after Storm. But Storm was clinical in their execution, and “Bagel-ed” [read as, thrashed 11-0] Flying Spirits.

At the end of the day, we had a good dinner and lots of ice-cream and discussed our favorite moments of the day. I felt proud to have featured in atleast one person’s favorite moments, in my first tournament! W00t! Some of us fooled around on the dance floor for a while, to some Gujarati and Bollywood music.

The next day started with us playing Royal Spirits (Pune). We started off strongly, but ended up giving away some easy scores towards the end of the game, and ended up drawing the game at 6 all. Our next game against Storm was another Bagel for Storm. They played zone on us, and though we were as patient as we could be, we simply didn’t have enough skill and team work to score against them. Our next game against Flying Spirits was a very good game, and I’d rate it the best amongst our games. We played a good stack and played hard on D, and were able to keep the scores at 5-5 until the last 5 minutes, when they scored and finished winners. The Flying Spirits admitted to us giving them a good competition and making them work hard for their goals. Our last game was against Zero Gravity, a team from the school itself, and our first victory! We started off pretty strongly, and were able to finish the game 10-5.

The final between Storm and Cats-Dogs (Delhi) was so much fun to watch. Storm stuck to their clinical performance and everyone seemed to be playing at their best! They came out winners 13-4 in a game that lasted close to an hour and a half. All the other games, btw, were games-to-11 and time capped to 55 minutes. Storm also managed to win the Spirit award for the tournament, and it is the first time in Indian Ultimate’s history that a team won both the tournament and the spirit award!

The tournament was a lot of fun and a lot of learning for me. I learnt a lot of things from everyone playing there, specially from the players in Storm. I know I’ll carry forward some wonderful memories from my first tournament, thanks to everyone from Storm Chasers and everybody else, who I played against. I really liked the idea of spirit circles after the games, where each team discussed the game and appreciated the other team about particular aspects of their team and play and suggested areas that they could work on, to improve themselves. I also hung out around some of the spirit circles of Storm and their opposition and I really loved listening to Apu speak to the opposition. On almost every occasion, it gave me goosebumps! Thanks Apu, for showing us, what the spirit of the game should mean to each of us. Ganesh mentioned, in the chat we had on the bus to the school, that I’d learn a lot more than just Ultimate, and it turned out to be true. I got to learn a lot about my team, and everybody on Storm chasers. I experienced what it feels like, to be a part of a squad or a team, for the first time and it feels great, in short! Thanks Ganesh for the chat, and all the inspiration on-and-off the field. In the middle of one of the games, Willis walked up to me and told me to be more confident on the field and move more crisply on the field. I’m not sure, that will change in one game, but that is something I’ll remember for a long time to come. Kayleigh reminded me of one of the good catches I took on day-1, by having it in her favorite moments of the day. As someone playing in his first tournament, that’s a pretty big deal! Thanks to Willis and Kayleigh for all the encouragement, guidance and training! Thanks to Parag for drilling it into our team, that we are going to keep the game’s tempo high, but our tempers low. The tournament was much more fun, that way. Thanks to Robo for giving me the cleats, and the encouragement during many a practice session. Thanks to Rose for being the wonderful captain that she was, thanks to Cheerag for showing us how much one can give on D, thanks to Craig, Diti, Rakesh, Sheryll and Vishal for being supportive and being patient with me and all my blunders. Thanks to Pixie for all the morning practice sessions, while we were waiting for everyone else to turn up. Thanks to Mak for help from the shouting helping me out from the side lines. Thanks to Jimmy, Megna, and Sarah, for making me feel a part of the squad, and for being a part of the wonderful Storm! Here are some pictures, thanks to Shantanu and Saurabh, who traveled all the way to Surat to watch, cheer and capture!

Even if, our team won just one out of the 6 games we played, it was an Ultimate tourney. Literally! Looking forward to future tournaments.