Active mind and software development

My Thoughts, Tips · 08 Jan 2008

Every software developer knows the importance of his or her own mind. Well, I feel that software development itself is an excellent mind game where an active mind can help you to drive the design and development of your software effectively.

If you are involved in the development of software for a domain where requirements keep changing every second, a developer needs to come up with new and new ideas to prevent the development process from stalling. To think of new ideas, you need to keep your mind focused on the problem which is difficult if your mind is not active.

To keep your mind active all the time, you basically need to keep it engaged in some activities so that your mind won’t have to stay idle. Let’s look at some activities that can keep your mind active and engaged for most of the time.

1. Reading: Everybody knows the importance of reading. Apart from keeping your mind engaged, it also helps you to learn new concepts, and to come up with some new ideas. You could read literature on almost any topic. Normally, whenever I get tired after long hours of software development, I like to read some story books or newspaper. It distracts my mind for a short time from the puzzles I was trying to solve while coding and thus, making it fresh again after some time.

2. Writing: Some people think that writing is generally a physical exercise. Just try to write some original articles or essays and you will come to know how much you need to think. But what to write? You can keep your personal diary where you can write your daily experience or a weblog where you can post your thoughts or ideas which could help others. If can even try to write your own poems or songs even if you haven’t written one before.

3. Playing mind games: Games like chess or sudoku are quite challenging by nature. You can even play these games without moving away from your computer (lol). Don’t worry if you are not expert in chess or sudoku as we are trying to play just for the sake of keeping our mind engaged.

4. Observing mother nature: If you are really bored of reading, writing or even playing then you can just hang out in some nice garden and appreciate the beautify of our mother nature. Trust me, it works!!!!! Once when I was struggling to come up with an algorithm to write one game, Alan had advised me to go out and look at birds and trees. I listened to his advice and soon after that, my problem was solved.

Here I’ve mentioned the activities that I follow to keep my mind active. Sometimes, I even do meditation for around 10 minutes. Don’t just limit yourself to these activities for keeping your mind engaged. Do whatever you like but make sure that your mind won’t stay idle.