Board Gaming: Some Popularity Required

With PAX being this week, I figured this would be a good time to talk about one of my favorite things about the event: playing lots of board games. Namely, that it is somehow really hard to do, at least it is for the kinds of games that I like to play. I really like more advanced board games, ones that take time to get good at and generally take 1-2 hours to complete a single game. My main problem is, I have a bunch of them, but I never get to play them.

LFG (Looking For Group)

If you want a real lecture on why finding people to play games with is hard, you should check out this panel from PAX. I’m just going to give a summary here focused on board games, since that’s the only area where I have trouble. Most video games I play are single player, so it’s not really an issue there. But, by default, board games require at least two people to play (well, the fun ones do). And to be fair, since my girlfriend likes playing these games too, two player games aren’t that hard. But getting to that third or fourth player (which a lot of games require) is tough.

It mostly comes down to the fact that I’m simply not popular enough to have people over on a regular basis. It’s not that I don’t have enough friends, I certainly do. I just can’t get enough of them to want to come over and play serious games. Whenever I do have friends over, it’s usually a lot at once, so we are forced to go more casual. Those games are fine and we have a good time, but I have several board games in my closet that I’ve bought and have not played once. That really sucks!

It has happened to me enough times now that I’ve started catching myself when I think about buying something that is only useful for groups. I got a huge dining table years ago in the hopes that it would be used for parties. It definitely has been good for parties, but I’m not entirely sure the frequency has justified the purchase. Same goes with the barbecue, it’s big enough to make food for dozens, but has only ever been used to cook for two. And it happened with board games, multiple times. I figured that if I had a bunch of cool games, people would want to come over and play them. Didn’t really happen that way, so I don’t buy them much anymore. I only buy games now that have good two player action.

I know that most of it is on me. If I really wanted to have people over to play these games, I could make it happen. I just don’t put it at a higher priority over most other things, so it doesn’t really change. For now I just accept that I should be more careful about what I buy, and maybe look into other avenues for getting more consistent gaming time.

So yeah, there isn’t much more to this post than saying that getting board games is only worthwhile if you are popular enough to have people over to play on a regular basis. It’s either that or spend all of your time at a game shop, which works too, but that’s not really for me. I just want to be able to use the stuff I’ve already got: lots of games and a huge table to play them on.

...

So for the next three Mondays, I will be on vacation in Europe, meaning that I won’t have time to write stuff. But that's okay. Hopefully it will give me more things to write about. For sure there will be at least one post about the trip, maybe more depending on what inspires me. I might end up also doing a mini-post on how PAX and other gaming goes this weekend. We shall see!

See you all in a few weeks!

Learning Languages

On the whole, I feel like I have a pretty good grip on the English language, but when I tried to learn German in high school, I struggled quite a bit with it. I do still remember some of what I learned back then, but I’m hardly conversational. But more recently, I’ve been learning French to try to be conversational enough for when we visit France next month, and I’m finding it much easier. There are still areas where I struggle, but on the whole, I’m learning much quicker than I ever did in school. I have to wonder why that is.

Programmers Probably Make Good Linguists

I think the answer lies in the fact that I am a programmer. Programmers are required to know multiple languages to do their jobs, some more than others. In addition to needing to have several languages, you also need to know frameworks that work with those languages. The equivalent for spoken languages would be that English, for example, comes in many forms that are used at different times: sentences, questions, paragraphs, prose, poems, legal, dialogue, etc. And each of those forms will have subforms, such as different meters for poems. Different dialects for a language are also like a framework, though it may be closer to having different versions of a programming language, depending on the context.

So over the course of many years, I have had to learn dozens of languages and frameworks to do my job. This is a bit easier than spoken languages though because, for the most part, programming languages all follow similar patterns and syntax. And unlike spoken languages, figuring out how to do something in a new programming language is often much easier (95% of your problems have already been solved on stackoverflow). So, transitioning is generally easier with programming languages.

Still, I do feel like once you get used to having to learn a lot of languages for programming, it makes learning spoken languages easier as well. I know that with French I apply more logic to it than I ever had with German, so most of the time when I stumble it is because of some non-standard rule (which there are plenty of). I’m probably still a ways off from being really conversational in it, but I’m going through the lessons very quick, and I’m retaining more and more as time goes on.

The Inflection Point

Which brings me to another thing that I’ve noticed, and it is something I’ve heard before but never really gave much mind to. The inflection point is the idea that when learning something, you will get into a rut where you struggle more than usual, but then you suddenly hit a point where it gets a lot easier. This happened to me about three months in on my French lessons. I got to a point where I could just remember things better. It’s really hard to explain how or why, but it’s apparently very common. I noticed it previously with learning guitar and drums as well. You just get to a point where things you were struggling with are suddenly easy.

And the best part is that there are multiple inflection points on the path of learning. It’s like having a real-life level up. A lot of people assume that you get to be an expert after spending 10,000 hours on something (most likely getting the idea from Malcolm Gladwell), and that the progress is linear. That’s not the case at all though. At zero hours, you know nothing. At 10 hours, you have the basics. At 100 hours you hit the first inflection point and start feeling good about your progress. But the next inflection point may not be until the 300-500 hour mark. And then the next one may be at 1000+ hours. Since mastery is a game of diminishing returns, each inflection point takes longer to get to. This is why most people eventually give up on being an expert, the rewards get harder and harder to reach.

While that can be discouraging, it’s good to know before going into something. If you really want to get good at it, the time to mastery graph is logarithmic (meaning that each point of mastery takes more and more time as you go up). For me, I don’t intend to ever be an expert at anything aside from programming, as that is my job and my biggest passion. Everything else, I’m fine with being better than most (which isn’t that hard since most will never even start).

...

Incidentally, if you want to learn a language for yourself, I highly recommend Duolingo. They only support five languages (assuming you speak English) so far, but the way they do it is great and the iPhone app is my primary means of learning. And I’ve learned the hard way that when they say you should practice every day, they really mean it. When I was struggling I would not want to do it, so I would let several days go by without touching the lessons. But when I forced myself back into doing it daily, the lessons got a lot easier. It also allowed me to hit that first inflection point faster.

Merci beaucoup pour lisent!

The Importance of Learning Tools

Like last week, this is going to be more of an observation than an advice post, but it does come down to one thing that I think can be a lesson. Namely, this post is going to be about how much easier life gets once you dive deep and really learn the tools you need for your trade.

As I mentioned about a month ago, one of the tools that I use at work and at home is JIRA. To explain it again, JIRA is a work management tool designed for programming teams to keep track of their bugs and features. After using it work for a while, I wondered if it would be a good tool for keeping track of my own backlog and tasks that I’d like to get done in my personal time. I gave it a trial period, liked how it turned out, so I have made it a part of my daily life. But one of the things that I learned while going through this process is that very few people at work actually know how to use it, and that is probably why, for the most part, they don’t like it. It does have its bugs and server issues, but most of their complaints are easily solved by proper configuration and knowing the workflow.

What really fascinates me about this whole thing is that only a handful of people at work actually take the time to learn the tool. We all have to use it, so it makes sense that you would put in some effort to figuring out its features and quirks. At the very least, there are some really handy keyboard shortcuts that make changing things much easier and faster. I enjoy these immensely and have no issues with organizing things.

Tools Are a Skill Set

Just like how a carpenter can’t do much without having the right tools, and knowing how to use them, people who sit behind a desk all day need to know their own share of tools as well. And perhaps even more importantly, you need to be able to continue expanding your toolbox. In pretty much any field, having skills that are rare is a huge boon to your future career, and staying on the cutting edge of what’s new is a good way to make sure you are a rarity. This applies to tools as well. The person who knows how to use more recent accounting software is going to be more useful than someone who is still using the programs from the 90s.

This doubly applies with enterprise software, since they tend to be the most obtuse, yet powerful, tools available to a professional. Getting into enterprise software is difficult for someone who doesn’t have a reason to use them (mostly because of cost), but if you are in a situation where you have to use a tool, it is a great benefit to yourself and others that you learn how to maximize the usefulness of it. You become the expert, the person that people come to with problems. That leads to better reviews, better raises, and better prospects in the future.

Obviously you will have to pick and choose what you want to master. For me, it is easy to get better at using JIRA because I use it outside of work. But when it comes to using Eclipse at work, I decline from learning much about it because it’s (in my opinion) a crummy IDE and most of my work is not dependent on it. It’s just the default IDE of choice, and it does the job well enough. I prefer to spend my time getting better at using things that most people don’t, like Vim and Ruby/Rails.

To sum up, if you want to be unique in a particular field, you need to know what the best tools are and how to use them. Become someone that others depend on for advice. And if you are really learning these tools well, then your productivity will also soar.

...

These posts are going to be shorter for about a month while I work on getting the next series of lessons ready. So for now, they are going to be mostly observations, rants, and other experiences. Hope that doesn’t disappoint too many of you. You can always go back through the archive and read some of the better stuff! Until next week.

Unnecessary Novelization

Ever since I signed up for Audible last year, I have been using it as a vessel for listening to books that I normally wouldn’t. Not to say the books I listen to are bad (for the most part), I just find it easier to listen to non-fiction books than read them. And when I read with my eyes, it requires my full attention, so I want those books to be worthwhile of my time. I can go through a few audiobooks a month just commuting around, meaning I can be a little more experimental. I have heard several great books this way, but there have been a few flops too.

And those books are what I want to talk about briefly in this post. This will probably be more of a rant than previous posts, but I feel the need to point this out to any authors (aspiring or otherwise) who read it.

Novels vs. Short Stories

One of the audiobooks I listened to about a month ago was On Writing by Stephen King. Some of the info is outdated these days since the publishing industry has changed significantly since the book was released in 2000, but his thought process about what makes stories good or bad is still relevant. I agreed with almost everything he had to say about the subject of storytelling, and I intend to keep it to heart in the future. And it clearly pointed out what was wrong with some of the other books I’ve read in the past couple years.

I think that the biggest mistake an author can make is assume that his or her story is a novel when it’s really a short story. There are a lot of reasons to want a story to be a novel, namely that short stories don’t sell well on their own, but taking a short story and stretching it out into a novel is not the right answer.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is highly regarded by most, it even won a Pulitzer, but I think it is a perfect example of a novel that is really a short story. The novel is already short to begin with, but I was bored to tears by the end of it. There are a few great moments in the book, but those only cover about 5% of the whole story. The other 95% is meandering, repetitive, and ultimately uninteresting. At least it was to me. I think if it had just focused on that 5%, it would’ve been an amazing short story that I would’ve loved.

Another popular “novel” recently has been Wool by Hugh Howey. I say “novel” because it’s really a collection of short stories that form a full narrative. The very first part, only about 10 pages long, is fantastic, and holds up as a great short story by itself. But then he continued with the story and it ended up boring by the end. I’m not saying that he shouldn’t have made more short stories after the first one, but they probably would’ve been better if they had not focused on the one silo, or if they had been not in the same timeline. I don’t know what the right answer would’ve been, but the plot just felt forced after the first part.

I don’t want this to become a beat down of books that I think were boring and overstayed their welcome, so I will leave it at just those two. There have been others, and with each one I endure, I get better at detecting it early on. With the last book I listened to, I could tell from the first chapter that it was going to be a book that could’ve been a short story based on how it was written. And I was totally right. The only reason I finished it was because it was a prime example of how not to write. If I ever detect my writing gets that bad, I will punch myself in the face and fix it.

So authors, I want to make a request. If you think you have a great idea for a story, I want you to really think about how much you can actually get out of that idea, and just focus on the best bits. Automatically assuming something is a novel is a bad practice. I know because I’ve done it myself. And in all of those cases where I assumed badly, I didn’t even finish the story because I got so bored with it myself. That should be a big hint.

I think what makes for a good indicator is this: If you have an idea that you can get five short stories out of, then you probably have something good enough to be a novel. Otherwise, just go with the short stories. If it truly is a good idea, you can get several of them out, and then it becomes a novel just like that.

...

So yeah, mostly just a rant today. I’m actually working on a short story, so I’m focusing more on that than other things. Hopefully it will turn out well. I’m pretty confident it will. Until next week!