How Meditation Can Make You a Better Software Developer
By: Huseyin Polat Yuruk
Tags: Programming, Self Improvement, Meditation, Self-awareness, Software Development

How Meditation Can Make You a Better Software Developer

Sometimes the solutions come to you when you sit there and do nothing

Photo by Simon Migaj on Unsplash

I came up with the idea to write this article weeks ago. Although constant work pushed me to write this article since that day, I constantly procrastinated by findings some excuses. My procrastination was an extremely normal-looking but confined mentality. Some flimsy reason.

In my opinion, most of the people in my country (Turkey) have a prejudice against meditation. This was the first perception I had in my mind. Also, I thought that my article must be a long one so that everyone can read it. I saw it as the best way to offer more satisfying content for my readers. This was my criteria for an article to be loved by the reader. And since this article is about meditation and when you combine a bit of prejudice together with imaginary criteria for article standard, I found justified reason to procrastinate in my writing.

As you can notice from these sentences above, I am sharing the results of my thought analysis with you, and while doing that, I feel the freedom to express myself without caring what you will think about me or my thought system. I have been meditating for over two years now, and it has greatly contributed to teaching me how to follow my thoughts, analyze them, and be myself without caring what other people will think about me. Besides seeing contributions in my normal daily life activities, meditation contributed to my work environment — or, to be more specific — in the software development process. I found some evidence of this and I came up with the idea of writing this article.

Especially in our country, many people think of the image below when we say meditation.

They see meditation as a joke because we all have this image in our minds. Of course, when I say this, I am sharing my impression I gained from other people. Since you are spending your valuable time reading this article, you most probably think differently, or at least you are trying to better understand the meditation phenomena before judging it. Whatever.

When we read the universal definition of meditation, it says that enjoying the moment and living this moment only without obsessing with the past and staying away from the anxiety that the future might bring is a great benefit for our mind. At the same time, it is about realizing your own thoughts and certain values that make you who you are.

For me, mediation is closing my eyes to observe my thoughts like they are in a train passing me by, and I am just an outsider who observes — rather than as an activity you do by crossing your legs and putting your hands on your knees. To understand what type of person you are and the real reasons underlying your thoughts, you need to get outside your own head and see yourself with different eyes. Meditation makes this possible. On top of that, meditation made me realize some incorrect mental structures I had when I was coding software on my desktop and helped me to make better decisions to become a better software developer by breaking the chains.