Let's play ball

It’s been a few weeks since I start, and these cold snaps need to stop. Warming my fingers up every ten minutes has slowed my coding down so much. It’s a stark difference compared to week one on the job.

New job, freshly landed

I would describe Santo Domingo as, at times, …aggressive. Buildings often felt like they loomed over the bumper-to-bumper traffic and motorcycles would thread through lanes in a semi-calculated dance. Elevated expressways, crowded with vehicles leaving the city, cut through swaths of tightly-packed apartments and businesses, some close enough to step over to from the overpass.

Amongst the throng was the van ferrying me to the second day of my new job: Senior Software Engineer for the Miami Marlins. Along with the rest of the Baseball Systems team, we headed to the Marlins Academy in the Dominican Republic, east of Boca Chica.

Talk about setting a high bar for onboarding.

My claim of week one being a lot was accurate. The idiom “drinking from the firehose” doesn’t do it justice. Between learning about our cohort’s responsibilities and initiatives, the technology they’ve deployed, what projects are coming down the pipe, and the Academy’s work as part of the Dominican Summer League and the Marlins’ recruitment pipeline (did I mention we were in the Dominican Republic, yet?), a firehose feels like a weak comparison. It was more like being dropped in the ocean. Thankfully, my colleagues were and have continued to be plenty supportive, answering my questions and entertaining my curiosities about the game and how the Marlins are trying innovating in the sport. It’s going to be a fun year, to be sure.

On top of a fantastic and productive offsite, whether through serendipity, happenstance, kismet, or something else, I got to reunite with some of my family. The bookend to my trip was being able to visit my father, whom I hadn’t seen in more than five years.

Removing friction to win

As someone whose last athletic foray was a poorly played season of JV basketball during his freshman year of high school, I never consciously drew parallels between sports and software. Yet, when you consider everything that gets tracked about players’ efforts in any sport, the need for intuitive tools to understand it all makes sense.

Over the last few decades, professional teams across sports have realized this, and have become highly invested in building better tools to improve their chances at a championship. The drama Moneyball touts how the Oakland A’s leaned on the concept of sabermetrics to out-recruit teams with deeper pockets and reach the playoffs in 2002, winning 20 consecutive games along the way. Tools for this kind of work have modernized since then, but like many an internal tool and enterprise software, “good enough” meant software was left alone as long as it got a result, even if it took minutes. My job is basically to help break that notion with intentionally designed, performant front-end code.

When I first applied to this job, I have to admit it was for the nostalgia. I was born and raised in Miami, growing up alongside the Marlins back when they repped Florida. Learning more about the work got me excited about building intuitive interfaces to surface a wide range of data, and working around areas like machine learning, data visualization, and statistical analysis.

Needless to say, I’m thrilled to have made the cut. I can’t talk about much, but I’m excited to share more about what I learn. For now, does anyone have some throwing drills to recommend? My fielding needs some work.