Off the clock

I chased a rating for a couple of years. Knew what I needed to shoot to move it, played rounds where a bad first five holes meant the rest was paperwork, finished them anyway in a bad mood. Then I tore an ACL, spent a long time off the course, and came back without the distance, the form, or the number I had been protecting. What was left was the round, and it turned out the round was the point.

I still play sanctioned events, still keep score, still want to win. The measure changed. If I threw one shot I will remember and spent four hours outside with people I like, that round worked.

The rest of my disc golf life is on the work side: the club, the Monster Mash, the jerseys, and a course I routed onto a city park plan. Someone with no budget had to, and it turned out to be the best product training I have had.

The mark above is my own: a thrower’s follow-through forming the B and G, with the PDGA number where a signature would go.

Every one of these gets the same treatment as a software system: a document of the current state, and a running log of what was tried and what it changed. The log is the valuable part. Six months later nobody remembers whether the buzz went away when the volume pedal came out, or only got quieter.

That case is the reference lesson, and it is the same lesson as debugging an integration. A slight buzz remained with the volume pedal removed, and a massive buzz came back with it plugged in. That is two faults, not one, and treating it as one wasted a month. Two symptoms that do not resolve together are almost always two problems.

The STI is heavily modified and has the maintenance history to prove it, most of it driveline. The Kamado’s recurring problem is not the cooker, it is living on the Gulf Coast, where anything left closed grows something. Both have taught me more about isolating one variable at a time than any course did.

The live audio engineer is the closest thing a concert has to a conductor: many signals in, one coherent picture out. The science is real, frequencies, pressure, coverage, and the artistry lives between the guidelines, in exactly how the snare pops and the bass bumps.

It was also my first product job, before I knew the phrase. Every room had a patron who found it too loud, and learning what that feedback actually meant, and what to do about it, is most of what I know about listening to users. I wrote that up in It’s Too Loud.

Florida State gave me a bachelor’s, an MBA, and the classroom where I now teach about a thousand students a year. It also gave me Bobby Bowden and Mike Martin, two coaches who spent thirty and forty years respectively proving that building better people was the actual job and winning was the byproduct.

I write about sports the way I write about product, which is to say I keep looking for the system underneath. Why a baseball program outlasted its own college. Why college football feels worse while the ratings go up. What sports betting odds taught me about forecasting that no planning framework did. Those pieces are in the writing, filed under Sports.