Baseball and coding are a match made in heaven.
Sports draw people in. They create community from the ground up. Every huge school also has multiple communities of students and locals who are drawn together by a shared love for a sports team.
Tech bootcamps don’t have sports. It’s not even an option. If you want to learn to code and you love sports your options are to spend 4 years at college or separate these activities altogether.
We need to draw more people into coding. As an industry and just for personal development. Why not use sports as a draw?
Baseball is what made me fall in love with coding. With math. Finally there was a use for math. I could understand baseball cards. Everything in baseball is math. Some of the best data engineers in the world are in baseball stats currently or they learned by analyzing baseball.
Baseball is a great match for coding, for math, and it’s also the best sport.
High level plan for American Space Software bootcamps:
1. Learn to code at a professional level.
2. Build baseball apps.
3. Play baseball.
4. Do both #2 and #3 as a team.
5. 16 week bootcamp. 4 week spring training. 12 game season.
6. Champion at end.
7. Your final project is your own baseball card.
8. Also it’s an NFT and by this point you know what that means.
Normal programs like this will spend 50–70 hours per week dedicated to software. I think it would be fun and useful for many different reasons to spend ~8 of those hours doing lightweight baseball drills. Then at the end of each week we play a game and keep score and put it in the little database we’re building. We get to live out the use case we’re building.
The NFT will have your sports stats and your academic record. Both fully public the entire way. Baseball players learn to get comfortable making mistakes in public and so should software developers. It makes you stronger.
Recreationally competitive. Just do your best and try your hardest. Anyone can play we’re going to change the game to make it safer. We’re going to use a softer ball and remove any physical contact. The game will be shorter too. The point is to use baseball as a team building exercise and to have fun and not to become elite athletes. In a dream scenario we do end up with competitive leagues too but that’s not the real point.
Trying to prototype this as soon as I can. There are logistical issues.
Also I’d like other bootcamps to easily copy this and contribute because we need enough teams to make real leagues. Then we can kick the NCAA in the mouth. Together. 🤝
EDIT: Ok maybe no kicking. I forgot we weren’t doing contact.
At first I am focusing entirely on the tech side of things. Gotta get that right or the rest doesn’t matter. Then the sports will be a complement and a draw to attract talent who also like sports which is a whole lot of people and the NCAA is arguably a huge reason why the university system dominates education.
