At Peace With Puzzles at Work, Home

Playing fast in hockey is about more than skating speed. There are systems of play skaters become familiar with, instantly knowing where on the ice both the puck and teammates will be. There is hockey IQ, an ability to read open time and space in a nanosecond that leads to scoring chances and goals. Yet make no mistake, speed is also huge.  

For Erin Peach, a software engineer on the Kraken’s mobile application team, she understands playing fast extends beyond the ice surface. That’s because she finds time in her busy work life to balance herself as a “competitive speed jigsaw puzzler.” 

During a recent conversation, this delightful fact unfolded logically  – just like all that coding she writes for the benefit of Kraken fans using the franchise’s one-of-a-kind app.  As it happened, Peach was talking about her first computer science class at the University of Washington, a four-year period of enlightenment that started with the ambition to become a librarian and finished with UW master’s and undergraduate degrees in computer science and engineering.  

“Right away, the professor got us coding basic stuff, so it doesn't feel like this Herculean mountain you have to climb,” said Peach, smiling pretty much nonstop throughout our entire talk. “That class was a neat opportunity to really see the cause and effect. That is what I really love about computer science. I view it as a puzzle you have to push and tweak and get everything to work. Then once you do, you have something. You have a giant picture at the end.” 

So, Erin, what’s your favorite puzzle to solve? 

Huge grin, then Peach answers: “I love jigsaw puzzles. I've become a competitive speed jigsaw puzzler. I have a competition coming up at the end of this month in the U-District. I’m such a jigsaw puzzle geek. But I also love word puzzles and anagrams. I do them on the New York Times app every day.” 

Tying Back to Playing Fast 

Building those jigsaw puzzles as a competitor is definitely about speed but, like hockey, Peach created a system of sizing up a puzzle, dividing and conquering the puzzle pieces into segments. She spends lots of practice time getting familiar with and refining her systems for solving different kinds of puzzles.  

“I’ve always really liked puzzles and knew I could do them quickly,” said Peach, who is married to a mechanical engineer, Nate Steinbock, who does at times join in puzzle-solving at home. “I heard last May for the first time there were competitions. I went to my first one and fell in love with it. Now our house is filled with puzzles. 

“The competitions feel very much like an exam. We're all seated at desks. They hand out black bags with the puzzle inside. We don't know what the puzzle is. When the timer starts, we rip open the bags, all seeing the puzzle at the exact same time. One of my favorite moments is hearing people react, because sometimes they're like ‘Yeah!’ or other times, ‘No!’ when they see the puzzle type.” 

Peach said she sorts the puzzle pieces “really quickly and I try to get the majority of the border built.”  

“While I'm doing that, I'm looking at the picture to try to identify big groups of color,” said Peach, in her third year with the Kraken after previous software engineer roles with the Obama Foundation and Code.org. “I might decide,  ‘I'm gonna separate all the green out and put those pieces together.' Then keeping building from there. I try to create blobs [of the puzzle] that come together.” 

Bringing Forward Coding  to the Kraken App 

Peach’s group leader with the Kraken, Chris Scarbrough, didn’t know about her puzzle prowess as a competitor. Peach doesn’t call attention to it during her work days, though she can be spotted working on common puzzles in the employee lunchroom at Kraken Community Iceplex.

“What an interesting hobby!” said Scarbrough, Kraken vice president of digital innovation and fan experience. “Software engineering can be compared to solving puzzles in a lot of ways. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it sounds like fun!” 

Scarbrough appreciates Peach’s work output on multiple levels and even unknowingly references working fast: “It can be imposing stepping into a codebase that’s completely foreign to you. There’s often a significant ramp-up period before a new engineer can feel comfortable contributing meaningfully. Erin ramped up very quickly and was effective from the start. She’s even more confident now, contributing to team discussions, project plans, and more ... She’s grown into someone I can rely on to get something done both quickly and thoughtfully ... she can move fast while maintaining quality.” 

For her part, Peach aligned with the values of the Obama Foundation and cherished her first job with Code.org working to help underrepresented students achieve technology skill sets and subsequently broaden diversity in the field. That first job made sense in that as a student Peach was part of a team at the UW Center for Game Science that coded and built a fun but educational math game for third- to fifth-graders.  She was thrilled to apply for the Kraken role.  

“Having been raised and gone to school in Poulsbo, I used to take the ferry over to see Seattle Storm games with my parents,” said Peach, who is working hard this summer on the Kraken app’s Game Day Companion section. “My birthday is always right at the beginning of the WNBA season. I enjoyed a lot of birthdays at the arena. I grew up loving Sue Bird. My parents went to school at the University of Connecticut, so we started watching her when she played for UConn and then got drafted by Seattle. Even though I didn't know hockey as a kid, when I saw this role pop up, I was excited. I know what it means to love a Seattle sports team and be passionate about that. It was an opportunity to work in the city I love and have that emotional connection, right?”

Upping the Female Profile in Computer Science 

Peach is equally passionate about expanding roles for women across computer science and software engineering. She makes a point of joining Kraken fan development staffers who visit schools for all sorts of reading, academic and physical activity programs. Peach said women in the industry are more common with “so many initiatives” but there is still work to do. 

“I really, really love working with [Kraken fan development manager] Tyler [Deloach], and the fan dev team to do school visits. It’s not that students must leave feeling transformed. My goal is they leave knowing when they think of a computer scientist or software engineer, they have at least one woman to reference in that world. They have a real-life breathing example of what that looks like.” 

Peach is smiling again: “I wear a pastel pink blazer or something like that when I show up. I want the students to know what you can do and how you can be yourself in this role. It’s as important that kids see that any one of them could be up there talking to students someday about a career in computer science.”