The Motorcycle Cop

As I drove home today I noticed a motorcycle cop had pulled someone over. I was reminded of a motorcycle class I took from the local police department around Summer of 2005. It was a great experience and one of the things that stuck with me was a comment from one of the officers about speed and skill.

In a nutshell, he said something like the following:

Most people think going fast is impressive, but going slow requires skill.

To be clear, he was talking about giving demonstrations. Going slow is more difficult because of physics.

However, for spectators, speed is interesting, and slow-driving skills are only interesting to fellow riders.

Why is riding slow harder?

Under about 12 - 15 miles an hour, you turn the front wheel much like in a car. To go left, push forward on the right handlebar and pull on the left handlebar.
As with a car, to turn left, you rotate the steering wheel counter clockwise. The handlebars on the motorcycle also turn counter clockwise if you look from above. This is steering.

Things change around 15 miles an hour. At this speed and above, your tires are like gyroscopes. They resist turning. Rather than turning the wheel left to go left (pulling on the left handlebar), you deflect the front tire by pushing forward on the left side. Effectively, to go left you attempt to turn clockwise rather than counter counter clockwise. This is called counter-steering.

At slow speeds, you might also “clutch” the bike. That is, partially engage the clutch while “rolling the throttle” or while increasing the RPMs of the engine. This engages the suspension and lowers the motorcycle’s center of gravity.

So riding slowly is a difficult activity. If you don’t ride, or you’re looking for fancy tricks like jumps, none of these details are relevant as a spectator.

However, you are probably not here to learn about counter-steering, clutching, the three parts of a car lane, the impact of wind, heat, etc. on riding.

Tai Chi

My mind then jumped to the thought of practicing slow to move fast.

This lead me to think about Tai Chi. I’ve been practicing since around August of 2015. At the beginning I was lucky to not bump into other people while I tried to do the form. Now I occasionally fill in for my Sifu.

There’s a lot going on when I practice. I’m about 3 years in and at a pretty deep level I’d say I’m nearly a beginner. I have memorized a version of the Yang Style long form.

I am not able to apply or remember much of what I’ve learned at any given moment. At some time through the form I’ll likely remember much of it, assuming I’m not distracted. The slower I go the more I can recall what I’ve learned so I can make continuous adjustments.

My body is to the point where it takes care of several of the details for me. What comes next seems “obvious” and “natural.” All I need to do to confirm that the next thing is neither “obvious” nor “natural” is do try doing the form on the opposite side. When I do that my only hope is to slow down to the point of stopping to figure out what is next. And I still mostly fail on the other side.

I practice Tai Chi as walking meditation. I get more from practice when I practice slower. The more I can increase the time it takes while moving continuously, and therefore slower, the more I get.

To an onlooker, it might look like there’s not much going on. It’s not obvious. It’s slow. It must be easy. But the internal experience is nothing like the outward appearance.

(Standing) Wu Chi

Early in 2018, one of the people I was coaching asked about Tai Chi. He said “teach me something.” I worked on showing him how to stand.

Well that’s easy, I stand all the time, right? How much is there to know about standing?!

I’m still a beginner, but here are a few things to consider when standing:

Feet shoulder width apart
Feet parallel to each other
Toes just to the outside of each big toe aligned with middle of ankle
Balls of feet connecting to the ground
Heal of feet connecting to the ground
Form an arch between the balls of your feet, like a Japanese bridge
Form an arch between the large ball of each foot and its heal
Engage all five toes of each foot with the ground
Knees slightly bent
Knees pointing forward
Pelvis neutral to straighten the lower back or the gate of life
Spine erect
Relaxed/collapsed chest
Shoulders relaxed (this is an ongoing challenge for me)
Elbows bent as if holding a beach ball
Hands pointing to the lower Dan Tien (which is about two fingers below the belly button and about a third of the way into the body
Neck erect
Raise your head as if a string is connected to the fontanelle
Chin slightly pushing in to the back of the neck

This is a good start at how to stand I suspect. I also suspect if I asked my Sifu, he’d triple the list as this is only considering body awareness.

Oh, and that’s what comes before doing the long form, which is give or take 138 steps, and about 15 different techniques with variations.

“Simply standing” like this is engaging and, frankly, hard work. Also, the only way I’m able to keep track of all of this is by going slow. I take my time scanning my body while making these adjustments, over and over. Even so, I’m going to maybe maintain 20% of all of these things any given second. The 20% will shift consistently.

My colleague and I did this for maybe 5 minutes. I did not give him the entire list above. In fact, I don’t think I knew that list early in 2018. We did this for about 5 minutes. Even 5 minutes of intentional practice like this can feel tiring as the practice encourages presence to the current moment, which takes effort.

My Real Job

Back to my drive home. I was getting close to home by now, and the idea of going slow to go fast lead me to think about coaching technical practices.

A way I find helpful to learn a new language is to actually type it. Each language seems to have its own cadence. I often fall back on typing C when I’m working in another language and get distracted. I can tell by the sound of the spacing, how my hands are moving, etc. what language I think I’m typing.

Once I’ve learned the basics of a language, I can start thinking at a higher level. Maybe I go to the basics like coupling and cohesion, or assignment of responsibility, the SOLID principles, deign patterns, language idioms, test-first, and so on.

When I move to this level, I do the same thing I did at the language level. I take time practicing techniques, problems, and even keyboard shortcuts to get this higher level of thinking connected to my kinesthetic memory.

One great way to do that is is through code katas, or maybe full on programming problems. I have a few in my back pocket I lean on. Having accidentally practiced repetition on a single problem for years because I was teaching in the 90s, I have quite a bit of experience with a few problems. More importantly, I have practice practicing and learning how to make small variances in a solution to see what happens.

As a consultant and a coach, I see many people reluctant of “new” ideas like refactoring as described by Martin Fowler, or legacy refactoring as described by Michael Feathers.

Often work is too swamped to “waste” time learning the basics. However, much like luck is “good” if you work in a way to have enough space/flex and can respond to events, and “bad” if there’s no room to breath. Taking time to step back and practice things slowly, deliberately, and continually enables moving much more quickly. Trying to move quickly in a code base without this practice might work, but I think it’ll overall be slower.

I find that when I’m able to pair with someone and have them give the techniques a go, more often than not I see people learn that many of these techniques and ideas are actually not too scary, are much more light weight than then seem at first, and can really be effective.

We need to go slow enough to have the time to learn some “basic” (pun intended) ideas, and allow our System 1 thinking to learn patterns so we don’t dismiss ideas that in the past we’d skip over because of how we’ve learned up to that point.

Home

As I arrived home, I looked forward to capturing these ideas. I’ve recently started blogging again, so I started capturing my thoughts.

I have also spent a bunch of time learning about the system I’m using (Jekyll + Google pages). I’m combining practicing writing again, with figuring out how to customize by blog.

Refactoring and CD in Blogging

As it turns out, refactoring techniques have come in handy as I’ve been experimenting with layouts. I’ve also been apply ideas from Continuous Deployment to my post release approach.

The first thing that came up is that there’s a difference between running my blog locally and on Github. Github pages does not support of all of Jekyll. The difference is not currently an issue, but it could lead to mistakes that I don’t notice until after I’ve pushed. To address this, I added in something I’d say is analogous to a feature toggle. I set a post status to draft while working on it. There’s nothing unique to that idea. In addition, I modify the CSS for draft content to make it clear that this is a draft.

This offers some advantages:

I can push anytime I want and see how it looks “for real” versus “on my machine.”
The content is integrated and backed up.
I allow people to see what I’m working on as well as how I work.

It’s also a bit worrying as I tend to write too much and then take too little away. I’m OK with that stress.

Another thing that I’ve been doing when experimenting with layout is to add new layouts rather than change them in place. So before I understood how to pass flags into Jekyll layouts, I duplicated my post layout and used the duplicate. This is similar to making a new copy of a function and using it in one place but not others. The first step in refactoring is often one of creation rather than change or replacement. This more relevant in legacy refactoring than greenfield refactoring, but true nonetheless.

While my blog is mostly empty and new, there are some old posts I brought into it. By adding and using the new layout, the old posts remain unchanged. This allows me to experiment safely and limit the size of a mistake while I’m learning.

I don’t have an end to this blog per se. Mostly, it’s a few random associations and connections from a few domains. So I’ll end with a few questions:

What is something you do that from the outside might seem trivial, but from your internal perspective, is rich and rewarding?
Is there anything for which you go slow now so that you can go fast later?

Going slow to go fast

The Motorcycle Cop

Tai Chi

My Real Job

Home

Published 18 July 2018