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Mindful Code Exercises

Kevin McGillivray on September 05, 2017

One of my favorite ways to explore mindfulness is to integrate a mindfulness exercise into an everyday activity—washing dishes, driving a car, eati...
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chakzefir

Kevin, thank you so much for Headspace service. I have already started today, and I feel so

collected, that's great !

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Jonathan Irvin • Edited

Mindfulness wasn't my goal, but perhaps a byproduct of starting to write more on DEV. My goal was to create an app I can use to help manage my personal finances and for all intents and purposes, it's coming along nicely.

Throughout my journey, I've started blogging about my wins, my struggles, and general "here's what's going on" updates to whoever will listen. As a result, it's been nice so far. DEV is a very welcoming community and supportive for what I'm trying to accomplish.

Ben even gave me mod rights to a tag I was using so I had better control over how the tag looked! Talk about support!

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szklarca

I've been learning web development for the last year and a half, so I am just a beginner. In addition to a different perspective, I have a deep brain science background and I've been practicing Mind&Body systems with ever increasing awareness. For me at least, coding requires this special state of Mind that is the best described as Mindful. If, for various reasons such as bad night sleep, heavy breakfast, heat wave, stress, I loose this state, coding is just an unproductive struggle and pain. I just realized that coding in itself maybe a pure and true Mindfulness practice, or better say, the easiness and smoothness of your coding work is an indicator of Mindful state.

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Seth

Great suggestions Kevin. Thanks for this.

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Jared Price • Edited

Awesome to see you make it on the top reads of the week.

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Kevin McGillivray

Jared! What a small dev world...

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Matt Willis

First off, I love this! After reading your post, I bought Thich Nhat Hanh's book and I am devouring it.

I have been including the Git breathing exercises and mantras in my workflow and it has been really helpful in my endeavor to be more mindful in my daily life. I have been playing around with creating global git hook templates that will help remind me to practice these suggestions. I can share a Github gist when finished if people are interested.

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Tangy F.

@kevin Great article!!! There are great points! Meditation is very important.

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Anthony Lee

Pardon my ignorance, but what exactly is mindfulness?

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Lorenzo Pasqualis

Mindfulness is the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something.

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Julio Guzman

I needed to read this. Thank you.

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Daragh Byrne

Kevin! I've been trawling through dev looking for other folks who write about mindfulness and code. And I found this. I loved the pull request mantras!

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Daragh Byrne • Edited

I just stumbled across this! I write about exactly this at my blog CodingMindfully.com.

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chakzefir

Kevin, thank you so much for Headspace service. I have already started today, and I feel so collected, that's great !