Jul 05
I have been unforgivably lazy with my site updates for the past few weeks and so I expect that most of you have taken to checking for new content with increasing infrequency (or decreasing frequency, although that sounds less alliterative and much more boring). I am alive, generally well, and currently the owner of a third-place fantasy baseball team that is routinely bouncing in and then out of second place. Mostly though I have been spending my time making the final push towards the EXTREMELY imminent launch of FantasyBlueBook.com.
Lukas and I have decided that Wednesday will be the day, and if we miss that date… well, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong and at least one of us must be dead.
We have put an unexpectedly large amount of effort and brainpower into both the math and theory behind our website. A few days ago Lukas and I were taking turns at the dry-erase board drawing function graphs and debating which exponent holds a better curve to our “bench-slot roster penalty” equation before finally setting on x^(10/17)… ya know, because the numbers work out so much better than using something simple like x^(1/2).
I am tempted to actually post the 23-page / 1,027-line / 31,868-character database procedure that I wrote to calculate a football player’s fantasy value in the hopes that somebody somewhere might understand and appreciate the absurdity of it all. Instead, when you visit our site you will unknowingly execute a procedure that runs in one-tenth of one second and spits out a name and a single relevant number. It will look very easy, it will work very easy, and everybody will assume that it must have been very easy to do.
I promise you that it was not.
We’ve got graphs here, man! Diagrams and buckets and algorithms and sample calculations. Arrows pointing to other arrows pointing to anonymous decimals. Primes and double primes, base scores and normalized scores, excel spreadsheets up the wazoo and thousands upon thousands of lines of code that nobody will ever see.
I have even given serious thought to the idea that I could go to grad school and stand a pretty decent shot at earning a PHD by building a thesis off the algorithm work that we started here. I won’t, no doubt, but I am fairly sure that I could.
It is, in truth, a little bit frustrating because my greatest worry is not that our site won’t work or that people won’t use it. I worry that people WILL see it… and completely not care. This is exactly the sort of thing that, when given directly to the exact person who can benefit from it the most, will not be appreciated for what it actually is. I am doing my best to make it shiny – adorning a few bells and whistles in the hopes of catching the casual eye – but in the end this website will be much more a pocket knife than a chain saw. It’s a well-engineered personal companion that does exactly what you need, but it isn’t loud or intimidating.
What worries me is that I know it to be one of my greatest weaknesses that I always expect everyone to immediately understand and appreciate a good idea for what it is. I am not good at convincing people why I am right, mostly because I have trouble understanding why they don’t already agree with me. When something is so obvious to me I struggle to help make it obvious to everyone else. That problem is severely compounded when I have gone out of my way to hide the mechanisms that would otherwise explain the idea’s value. All that is left for the observer is a series of answers, and I can do nothing but ask you trust that those answers are correct. That’s fine enough for you who know me, but what then for everyone else??