Programmers and Poi
Poi, rhymes with Toy, are two sets of strings each with a ball at the end. Take a pair of long socks, slide tennis balls into the bottom of each, and that’s a set of poi. You’ve probably seen people spinning these things around their heads and if not, just search youtube for Poi. So why do this? And why do so many programmers seem to flock to this activity?
The answer is Poi is the continuation of what you started working on as baby when you learned to crawl and then walk. If you’ve ever watched a 10 month old baby finally “unlocking” the trick of rolling over from their back to the front, you know how happy it makes them. They are getting a shot of dopamine the likes of which they have never experienced before. That’s right. They are getting high. Have you ever seen a really happy baby? Doesn’t their expression look a lot like someone who has just done a bunch of drugs? And the flip side: a crying hysterical baby is how many of us react when all our dopamine is taken away.
But back to poi. Once you learn to walk you can meet all your basic needs and there is no longer any sink-or-swim issues to solve. So your motivation to really practice daily on new gravity tricks is low. Why bother? (To get high of course!) Imaging unlocking a new gravity trick and getting a rush of dopamine like babies get. And it’s legal! But there’s just one problem. To unlock a new gravity trick takes practice. A lot of practice. How can you re-create the sink-or-swim urgency of learning to walk all over again for an adult? Light the balls on fire of course.
I’m sorry, did you say light the balls on fire? Yes I did. Search for that on youtube too. Now all of a sudden there’s a real reason to practice day and night, night and day, every waking hour of the day… you don’t want to get hit in the face with a flaming ball of fire. And by giving yourself that level of motivation you can finally unlock some new tricks. (You practice without the balls on fire by the way. “Lighting up” is the very last step in your Jedi, I mean Poi, training.) But how does the adult mind get past being stuck and thinking “I’ll never be able to do this!” You debug the code.
Programmers know that feeling of being stuck all too well. You’ve tried everything. You’ve step through each line of the code line by line putting in print statements in between each. You run the program over and over looking for any clue that might explain why what you are trying to get to happen is not happening. And finally you come up with plans of attacks. And sometimes fixing the problem takes weeks. When it’s your real job and your boss is telling you giving up is not an option, you keep trying new ideas of how to solve the problem. Well maybe if I store a reference to this over there, and pass a hash of all these options to this method, then, maybe, etc. etc. And then one day it clicks. And then it seems obvious. And then you can’t believe how easy it is for you to see the solution now and how impossible it was/seemed just a week ago. And that’s a rush. And unlocking a poi move is a rush you can share with all humans, not just fellow programmers.
As fun a programming is sometimes, solving all those week long problems, you can’t put on a performance of your programming moves. But you can routinely blow people’s minds (including your own) by spinning socks with tennis balls.
