Mindfulness in the Face of Rage Coding

You are sitting at your computer, your fingers resting on the keyboard but they aren't typing. Your heart begins beating faster. The red error message from your rails console is telling you that you are wrong for the eighth time in as many attempts. Every angle you have tried to solve the error has failed, you see no other path forward. But time is ticking. You can feel the negative space between you and your deadline sucking you in like a blackhole; your skin becoming stretched, disconnected, your soul being pulled from your ribcage like a magnet unable to yield to its nature.

This is rage coding and it happens to all of us. Well, like 80% of that happens but the rest is a metaphor to communicate the ever-present feeling of #error in the world of my new occupational world: Coding Bootcamp boy. It is a world of trial and error, and if there were no errors, there would be no jobs. We are here for the errors, but boy oh boy, are the errors here for us.

These errors, like little malevolent demons with sharp claws and very well researched personal attacks, provide a crucial opportunity to identify and revise one's ability to cope with problems that are not immediately visible or whose scope is not explicit.

Our teacher, Brian Rice, has given us some valuable insight on this subject and his experience with it as an employee and as a teacher. Being able to feel delighted, or even assisted by error messages is a skill that takes deliberate practice and mental acuity.

Below will serve as an ongoing list of resources in the ongoing fight to not let the blackhole win. I wish you deep breaths and cool hands, please leave your ideas in the comments below (and I'll concatenate 'em :)

1. Waking Up App - Sam Harris.
   Key Takeaways: This app changed my whole life. 10 minutes a day, 20 minutes if you are having a bad day. Mindfulness helps you put down your concepts and frustrations and allows you to sink into your body in the present moment. It can seriously help in untangling the knot. (And comes with a free 30 day trial!)

2. How To Deal With Anger as a Programmer by Antonio Cucciniello (https://simpleprogrammer.com/anger-management-programmer) / Key Takeaways: Stress is bad for your health! The sooner you can deal with this, the longer you will live, no bap.

3. WHY WON’T THIS WORK?! Coding Angry for Fun and Profit by Reto Meier (https://medium.com/google-developers/why-won-t-this-work-coding-angry-for-fun-and-profit-1ef38a2b7196)

4. etc. ! Be well and take care of yourself :)