I got fat

42 minutes. My fastest 10km run.

26 minutes. My current 5km run. That should mean my current 10km time is roughly 52 minutes. But that’s not how it works. I’d be lucky to make it to 7km before I had to stop at a bench and “bird watch” for a while. What happened?

For starters, I got older. Time caught up to me. Injuries started to slow me down. Additionally, demands on my time caught up to me. I had to prioritize. Do the dishes or go for a run? Take the dog for a walk* or go for a run? Spend some quiet time with my wife after the kids go to bed or go for a run?

I prioritized based on my constraints and desires, weighed those against the trade offs, and here I am.

But the kids are getting older. They generally sleep through the night and are getting better at going to bed. They can even play amongst themselves for a short period of time. My constraints are changing and if I so desire, I could bring my 10km time down. I just need to hit the gym. Muscle memory is powerful.

Have you ever tried to calculate the longest increasing subsequence in an array? I have. I used to be able to rattle off a fairly good dynamic programming solution and with patience and thought, optimize to a more ideal solution. But I haven’t used those muscles in a long time. They atrophied. And that’s putting it nicely.

As my career progressed, the demands and responsibilities of my job changed. I wasn’t responsible for writing algorithms. That was delegated. I was responsible for my team performing. Responsible for making my team (and the individuals of the team) better. Responsible for ensuring my team produced what was needed, was safe, maintainable, and met our standards. As my career progressed, the problems got different, but they didn’t get easier. They involved people. They involved business cases. They involved the greater vision. The scope was larger. I wasn’t responsible for optimizing an individual piece of code, I was responsible for helping optimize the whole.

And the algorithms fell to the wayside.

In the last month, I’ve hit the gym.

Muscle memory is indeed powerful. I’ve lost a few steps but my goal isn’t to become a master algorithmer**. I’m simply going back to the basics and keeping my mind in the right space.

But discussing algorithms is not my goal here. There are plenty of sources out there telling you how to optimize an algorithm. Don’t get me wrong, I will still write about the exercises I’m doing, because I still love discussing the gritty details.

My goal here is to discuss how to grow and transition from optimizing an algorithm to optimizing the whole and (hopefully) where to go next.

* My dog used to run with me, but she also got older and now prefers a nice long leisurely walk.
** Not a word but I like it