Snippets

Back in college (the first time), I was into what some might consider an "extreme" sport.  Oh, there was no athletic ability involved--not unless you count hauling cases of newspaper/magazine clippings or occasionally sprinting across a campus...in high heels.  Once in a full-on snowstorm.  High heels are great for digging into some kinds of snow--trust me on this.

Basically, I was on the speech team.  And while I joined thinking that my focus would be on interpretive readings of poetry/prose/drama, I was shanghaied into something called "Impromptu."  The rules for that type of speaking were straight-forward:

1. You had absolutely no idea what you were going to talk about until it was your turn.
2. You would be given a topic, typically in the form of a quotation or proverb.
3. You had seven minutes to prepare and deliver your speech; you were docked for going over seven minutes--or running significantly under.
4. While you were prepping, the judge for your round would call out elapsed time in 30-second increments, and give you a countdown of time remaining by hand while you were speaking.

Talk about an adrenaline rush.  But it quickly became my favourite.  By sophomore year, I managed to un-suckify my skills well enough (relative to everyone else in my district) to actually advance to Nationals (where I pretty much sucked relative to the rest the country). 

How does one train to face the unknown?  My team more or less had a structure for each speech, which (apart from the obvious benefit) helped you pace yourself when were actually speaking.  But the Team Elders--which included the reigning national champion in Impromptu speaking (no pressure there)--also kept a full desk-drawer of note-cards containing quotations.  Sometimes it seemed like every sound-bite uttered by Every Famous Dead Person Ever was in that drawer.  To practice, you'd draw a card at random and find yourself riffing on anyone from Karl Marx to Groucho Marx.

My afore-mentioned Elders, as well as the official coaches, also liked to move the proverbial goal-posts.  For instance, after the first semester of my Freshman year, I wasn't allowed to use a note-card to jot down my outline--from then on, I had to keep it all in my head.  Still later in my career, the Assistant Coach knuckled down on my prep time.  Most folks spent between one and two minutes of the allotted seven in preparation.  I wasn't allowed more than one in practice.  Of course, the consequence of having less time to prepare was that I had to fill that much more time with content to hit the seven minute goal.  Eeep!

Like I said, it's one heck of an adrenaline-kick--even compared to public speaking when you have a prepared, memorised presentation.  (And keep in mind that PowerPoint hadn't even been invented at that point.)   Apart from reading, writing, and math, here are few skills as valuable as learning to hide your terror while you're on stage...or even being put on the spot in a meeting.  And being able to riff while still keeping the salient points at your synaptic fingertips is a huge--yea, even ginormous--bonus to that basic skill.

But the afore-mentioned drawer of quotations wasn't just a means to an end, either.  Being largely the handiwork of a couple of political junkies and a six-year student about to graduate with a Philosophy degree, you can imagine the breadth of topics.  Combining that with the discipline of organising my thoughts on the fly and making them sound good when they came out, the experience was a liberal arts education in microcosm.  And it is quite possibly the single most useful thing I gained from my four-year degree.  (Also, that's how I met Dennis, because he competed on the speech team of a neighbouring university.  If that's not a win, I don't know what is.)

Nearly three decades later, I'm fairly certain that this training has improved how I do my day-to-day work.  See, programming is no different from any other expertise in that the proverbial 10,000 hours of practice rule really applies.  But unlike, say, mastering the violin, the range of things you need to unlearn and learn anew to stay on top of the game doesn't diminish with time.  Moreover, much of that unlearning/relearning is done on the clock, on the spot.

That's where the Team Elders--in this case, the mavens of an unfamiliar (to me) technology/language/platform--come into play.  Their code snippets, typically by the time they're blogged or accepted/up-voted on StackOverflow, are like the nuggets received wisdom I once pulled out of the desk drawer.  Likewise, much of what I do afterwards is to fit them into the framework of the moment.  All while the clock is ticking, of course.  At the end of this process, if I've done my job correctly, there's the sense that I've added context and relevance to the snippet's pithy brilliance.  And I can vouch for being better off for the experience--maybe a little smarter, maybe a little more efficient, maybe even both.

So don't ever let anyone tell you that a Liberal Arts degree doesn't have practical value.  I'm living proof that it does.  Oh yeah, and I moonlighted on the Debate team, too--so I've been trained argue for a reeeeallllly loooooong time.  ;~)