Staying in the power zone
The ocean carries a tremendous amount of energy that travels hundreds or even thousands of miles and can offer you a great ride and a lot of fun while surfing if you only use it in the right way. Of course, the first thing is to be in the right moment at the right time, but once you are up on the wave, it is not yet over. Therefore, choosing the right line is very important to efficiently surf and make a great ride.
The wave, while breaking, is forming something we call a pocket. It is a place where the white water meets the open green face, which offers the most energy to somebody riding it. It can travel faster or slower depending on the type of the wave, and reading the speed of it is the key to choosing the right line. Because it is steep, it can help us generate speed that we can use later for maneuvers or a longer ride. Sometimes it rushes, so we kind of need to run away from it not to get smashed or not to get stuck in the whitewash, but sometimes it needs to be chased by cutbacks, so we do not go too far to the flat. For a very long time, I thought the more speed on the surfboard, the better. Still, by everyday practice and analysing the core of my surfing, of course, with the help of some great tutorials, I concluded that it is not about maximising the speed but about controlling it.
Often after catching a long waited wave, because we don't want to lose it, we rush quickly to the shoulder, ignoring the power the wave is offering. Fear of nosedive makes us paddle to the side, choosing the line that is sometimes parallel to the shore. As a result, we use only the middle part of the wave going up and down, struggling not to get caught by the whitewash. It is natural to think that we will have a long way to travel if we go down the wave. The thing is, surfing the green face of the wave is all about gravity. We generate speed by going down the hill and later pumping up. Unless there is a barrel, when you look at somebody ripping the wave, they often point the board's nose to the shore. Going down, bottom-turning, then climbing up, this sequence repeats and helps to stay in the right place using the full power that the ocean carries and offers. The important thing is to read what we have in front of us and use it to our advantage instead of fighting against it. The swell offers us something, and this is all we can have at this point. It is only a matter of using it well.
So staying in the power zone instead of rushing to the shoulder is an essential part of surfing. As usual, this concept applies well beyond riding the waves. While seeing the problem, we often try to find the shortest way to get to the desired goal, ignoring the natural source that gives us the momentum. To be aware of the potential that we can use, we need to know our environment and see what can help us ride faster and further at the end of the day. By staying in the place that we are comfortable with, we can miss the opportunity to have a ride of our life.
It is straightforward for me to find an example from my coding life. When there is a feature to build, we can tackle it in many different ways. One is to go with the flow and hack it until it works with little effort to make the code reusable and testable. Then if somebody requires you to have automated tests, you write whatever is possible in the current architecture, ship it and get back to the line-up to catch another wave of complexity, waiting for bugs to come through. A short ride produces the outcome, but you are far from optimally using the opportunity. Another way would be first to look around where the objective complexity is, divide it into smaller pieces and deliver in small chunks. It would give you time to look back and see where you can improve your architecture, what components are worth pulling out, what the designer was thinking, maybe even involve him early on to get feedback sooner. It is much more stylish to go a bit slower and can help you to ride much longer. Of course, it doesn't mean you can avoid all the bugs. Still, it will be easier to go back to the code written in a more modular, composable way with architecture in mind rather than a big ball of mud with a mutable state floating everywhere. Unless you will never have to look into the code again, so maybe then just getting it out of the way as quickly as possible is a better option.
In conclusion, with more experience in both surfing and programming, I see that it is not only about delivering quickly but riding the waves of complexity with style. I prefer to aim for more satisfying and longer-lasting goals rather than immediate gratification.
