Mindful Development
I ran a session at SoCraTes UK called Mindful Development. My intention was twofold. Firstly, to introduce meditation as a simple technique for personal well-being to developers who had not experienced it before. Secondly, to create an opportunity to observe the physical and psychological effect that development has on us, especially when working very closely in pairs.
The session started with a short introduction to mindfulness as a concept, followed by a 10-12 minute guided meditation. The emphasis of mindfulness is on simply allowing the busy mind to settle into a calm state, often using physical sensations such as sound, touch and the breathing as points of focus. After a short discussion we moved on to a simple pair programming exercise for 20 minutes, followed by a second 10 minute meditation. We closed with a further discussion, and hopefully everyone felt they had a chance to express any challenges or questions they had.
I felt it important to stress from the outset that there is no suggestion of ‘higher order’ states of mind or spirituality involved. The idea is simply to let the busy and wandering mind settle down- something which is not easy to do by simply ‘thinking’ about it. I hoped to explain this idea so that they would be able to relax and follow the points of guidance through the session. The feedback from the first meditation session was positive but reflected this point- the most challenging factor for most participants was the element of the unknown, and a natural uneasiness with the setting.
For the second session, a major point of discussion concerned the physical and mental response to the act of programming and human interaction. It takes a lot of mental energy to make the amount of decisions required to write even simple pieces of code, and this is only amplified by having to collaborate with someone else. Naturally this causes the mind to become busier. Some participants noted that they felt a difference after the kata, not only in their mental state, but also in their physical sensations. The body and mind are obviously highly connected in the way they deal with stress, and it was nice that this could be experienced so directly.
The pair programming kata was definitely one of the quietest I have ever observed, with everyone going about it in a very subdued way. I couldn’t say whether this was the result of undertaking the first meditation or whether it was a combination of other factors: being a very ambient room, a smallish group of developers relatively unfamiliar with each other, the session being early in the day, the general expectation of the session, session selection bias etc.
I was fairly nervous about both my ‘performance’ as a guide and in trying to help people feel relaxed and comfortable. After a slightly shaky first 30 seconds, dogged by self doubt, I think it went smoothly. I learned from the experience, about myself as a presenter, and from sharing the experience with others. As with many open space conference workshops, the host often gains as much as the attendees.
I am tempted to run further sessions on the subject in the future, and am keen to open discussion in the development community about how we think about thinking. We have optimised many areas of the software delivery lifecycle, but many techniques unsurprisingly do require developers to actually think and make good decisions. If there are techniques we can use to support this then they should be of interest to a wide audience.
