Articles - Coding Mindfully

On calling out stress in other developers (and yourself)

My colleague had that look in his eyes. One I’ve seen in my own eyes many times before. It had been a long day with a tricky bug, in an important part of the front end. This particular form needed what we thought was a simple change. As we investigated, we found that tech debt...

What to do when faced with the excellence of others

(Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash) I work with several extremely competent people. The kind of people who appear naturally effortless at what they do – coding, running projects or businesses, writing, conversation – you name it, I know somebody who is excellent at it. I’ve been fortunate that this has been the case a number of times...

What I’ve learned about HumanOS – the Human Operating System

As programmers we educate ourselves to a high degree about the internal operations of the platforms that we work with. We acquire knowledge about the structure and data flow in the frameworks and libraries that we use. We develop intuitions about how complex systems fit together, and know how we can influence those systems to...

5 Yoga Poses Every Programmer Should Try

5 Yoga Poses Every Programmer Should Try In case you didn’t already know, sitting is the new smoking. It’s also a pretty prominent feature of most coder’s lives. Coding is a stationary, chair-bound activity for the most part (unless you have a fancy stand-up desk). Coding jobs require you to occupy your chair for hours on...

Why this software developer teaches meditation

I was a confused teenager. Now this is a fairly common state of affairs, especially amongst the technically minded. It’s a turbulent time, what with all the hormones and the forming of our nascent identity and the new ideas and the school and the sports and the zits and the hormones and the parents and...

Falling in and out of love with Code

Beginning I’ve fallen in and out of love with code a hundred times. When I was ten, I was impressed and mystified by the ZX Spectrum that my father left plugged into our family TV set (imagine that!) on the morning of my birthday. It was one of the earliest attempts at accessible mass-market computing,...

How I beat impostor syndrome and stopped feeling like a fake

I have a confession to make. I have been an impostor throughout my entire adult life. When I was studying physics at Ireland’s leading university, graduating near the top of my class, I was no good at any of it. It was a complete fluke, an accident. When I excelled at my master’s degree in...

Keep your code flowing – an introduction to flow for programmers

How to optimise your experience of life One of the things I’m most concerned about in life is opti mising my experience. I want my work life, my free time, and my relationships to be packed full of value, meaning, and fun. It’s a bare fact that we’re not here for long in cosmic terms...

How your mind evolved to keep you safe (and why you don’t always feel that way)

As I sit here typing this, I’m contemplating my hands. Human hands are pretty amazing. There are 27 bones in each, connected to one another by a sophisticated set of connective tissue, all operated by a carefully collaborating cohort of muscles. The dexterity of a human hand is unmatched in any other animal – a...

A Programmers Guide to Stress

I almost lost my mind once. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I almost lost my mind because I wasn’t taking care of it. Way too much crunch time for an important project, coupled with some ongoing issues in my personal life, pushed my ability to cope with day-to-day life into...