The emotional debugger

Bryan Kroger
Jul 20, 2017 · 3 min read

As an SRE/DevOps type with a heavy emphasis on the Ops side I rarely ever use an IDE other than VIM. However, over the last year I’ve used the JetBrains series of IDEs like PyCharm and RubyMine. My developer colleges have showed me the wonderful world of breakpoints and debugging applications through these IDEs.

It really goes to show that there’s always something new to learn. What I learned with these IDEs is how to set breakpoints which allow me to pause the execution of a program in order to look at the operating environment of the program.

For example, let’s say I’m working on a program that takes some JSON data, processes it, then spits out a different set of data. I can put a breakpoint half way through my application, run it, then the application will stop at the breakpoint and give me all kinds of information about what is going on with the application.

I started to wonder if this same idea could be applied to my emotional program as well. Almost like a tool in my Emotional Intelligence tool box.

All programs are comprised of three parts: input, algorithm, and output or outcome. The user input in the case of an emotional program could be anything we consume during the day. Maybe it’s something we might read in the news, or something someone says to us at work.

The practice here is to use the idea of a breakpoint to really analyze the stack of our emotional programming. This can be an exhausting exercise if you do it all the time. My suggestion is to focus on the things that cause the most amount of emotional content. For example, the things that really get you riled up, whatever that may be for you.

As you practice you’ll get better and this will become more and more natural, and at some point you might get to a place where you’re analyzing your emotional program in near real time. One definition of enlightenment that I’ve heard is that it is the understanding of how you respond to things on an emotional level. If we translate that to tech speak we might suggest that enlightenment is the process of knowing how your emotional program will respond before the user input is given. Or perhaps understanding that an output from your emotional program is just output and you have the ability to control what the output means.

Let’s take this out for a spin and see how it works. I’m going to propose a statement as our user input. I want you to implement your breakpoints into your emotional processing algorithm and let’s just see what the stack looks like when we hit the breakpoint.

Here’s the statement: “Trump 2016”

What is your stack saying here? Is it anger? Betrayal? Loss? Perhaps it’s pride, gratitude maybe? The stack can show us anything, and sometimes ( just like real programs in the real world ) sometimes we learn things that we were not expecting.

Emotional stack traces can show us quite a bit about what we value. Sometimes what we complain about is a window into our disfunction. I have often complained about one technology over another ( Chef over Ansible for example ) because of my disfunction to need things done in a certain way that I believe is correct. Correct is often relative, and I’m often wrong in regards to my own motivations and desires for a perfect world.

Sometimes our stacks can tell us things that we don’t want to admit about ourselves. Sometimes our stack traces can hurt. Lean into that hurt, love yourself for learning something about yourself.

Like they say: feedback not failures.

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Bryan Kroger

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Exploring the space at the intersection of technology and spirituality.