Meditation can help software developers by improving focus, reducing stress and social isolation, and cultivating mindfulness. It trains the mind to focus on the present moment and let thoughts come and go without getting caught up in them. For developers, this allows them to enter a state of deep focus needed for programming and to disengage from work thoughts after hours. Meditation also fosters understanding over judgment, which can help maintain complex code by viewing it without preconceived concepts. While the technique is simple, regularly practicing meditation can have mental and emotional benefits that enhance both work and life.

1. MEDITATION,
SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
AND LIFE

2. DISCLAIMER
• I have been meditating for a bit more than two
years now which, in terms of meditation practice, is
very much considered as a beginner level.
• I am not a teacher. I am just here to talk about the
practice. Should you need some guidance to
meditate, it is safer to do so with the help of
experimented teachers.

3. SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IS
HARD
• Discipline which requires lots of focus.
• So much so that the usual way to parody
Developers’ behaviour in the movies is to play a
nearly autistic one.
• The discipline requires this state of mind.

8. SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IS
HARD
• Human (regardless if they are intro or extroverts)
need Social Interactions.
• Hyperfocus, Racing Thoughts, Social Isolation,
Irregular sleep patterns can lead to Depression
which is really common in our industry.

9. SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IS
HARD
• The qualities a Developer needs to have are many:
• Curiosity, Discipline, Patience
• Adaptability
• Willing to leverage existing code (why invent the
wheel)
• Passion

10. CAN MEDITATION HELP?

11. WHAT IS MEDITATION?
• Meditation is not a religion. It is not about preying any
Deity.
• Meditation is a technique whose main goals is to increase
awareness and equanimity.
• Meditation could be considered as a spiritual practice:
happiness regardless of external circumstances.
• Several forms of meditation exist (Zen, Vipassana…)
• Let’s talk about what they have in common.

12. WHAT IS MEDITATION?
• The goal is not to retrospectively think about what
happened in your day.
• It is a training of your mind to quieter it.
• In lots of meditation books, our mind is described
as a little monkey which jumps everywhere. The
more the monkey jumps, the more the ropes
around him are getting tied to him. Let’s quieter
the monkey.

13. WHAT IS MEDITATION?
• We make the conscious choice to follow our breath and
only our breath.
• Every time our mind looses its focus to think of a given
thought, let’s put our attention back to the breathing.
• Many techniques can help following the breath:
• Visualising the point where the air enters our nostrils.
• Counting the breath…

14. MEDITATION IS EASY AND YET
VERY HARD
• Describing the technique is very easy: just follow
the breath.
• However it is also very hard for the very reason it is
hard to think about nothing.
• It is also hard because it is new. When one wants
to learn a new skills (playing guitar, learn a
language), it is challenging because we are not
used to it.

15. BENEFITS OF MEDITATION FOR
A DEVELOPER
• By training our minds to stay focus on the breath, we
sharpen our focus in our every day life. There has been
countless studies which show experienced meditators
being able to stay focus on a given object for hours
while others could stay only a couple of minutes.
• Since I meditate I personally noticed a huge gain in the
time I needed to put myself in this state of mind needed
for programming.

16. BENEFITS OF MEDITATION FOR
A DEVELOPER
• Meditation can also help in getting out of your thoughts. After a
day programming, mosts developers go home with a mind full of
thoughts.
• Having dinner with your wife / friends could be challenging as
you remain in your thoughts. (Hyperfocus, Social Isolation)
• By training your awareness and you capacity to let thoughts
come and go, you allow yourself to not dive in them and to be
right here, right now. By observing something, you are not part
of it.

17. BENEFITS OF MEDITATION FOR
A DEVELOPER
• We live in a very sophisticated world.
• It would be impossible to survive this complexity without some tools. One of the
tools that we have are concepts.
• When I see an apple on a table, I notice it internally: ‘this is an apple’. Same thing
when I see cars in the streets: ‘these are cars’. Yet, we all know cars and apples
could have many different shapes and characteristics.
• The language is an interesting tool to help building these concepts. However it
is worth noticing that by saying internally ‘this is an apple’ and then move on to
the next object, we let the concepts define the reality. Unless we use some
adjectives, we are going to grasp the reality with the same level of focus that this
concept carries.

18. BENEFITS OF MEDITATION FOR
A DEVELOPER
• In Computer Science, we use concepts a lot too.
• When we create an Application and define the
Objects, their relationships, we use concepts.
• When we try to understand an existing Application,
we also use concepts. It is worth noticing the concepts
used to understand an Application at a high level are
often not the concepts used to create it.

19. BENEFITS OF MEDITATION FOR
A DEVELOPER
• When meditating, we train our mind to not identify ourselves
with our thoughts.
• By removing ourselves from the equation, we free ourselves.
• By doing so, we also cease to identify concepts with Reality. We
start seeing things as they are (Vipassana): concepts are just one
of the many descriptions of a Reality with a given focus.
• This is really helpful when it comes to maintaining and
developing an existing codebase.

20. BENEFITS OF MEDITATION FOR
A DEVELOPER
• When adding a feature, debugging an application, it is often the
case developers who need to maintain the code, grasp it with an
overall level of details not as deep as the developers who
authored it.
• The ultimate low level of understanding being: ‘this looks
terrible, let’s rewrite it.’
• With meditation comes programmer modesty. Instead of using
judgement as a concept, as a way to grasp reality, one starts to
use understanding. (This saved me so many troubles)

21. BENEFITS OF MEDITATION IN
YOUR LIFE

22. BENEFITS OF MEDITATION IN
YOUR LIFE
• These different levels of concepts also apply in our day to day life.
• We tend to see our friends as good and our enemies as bad. But
obviously no one is inherently good or bad. However, interestingly these
high levels concepts tend to change our vision of the reality. There were
many studies which showed the following:
• when a friend of us behaves not correctly, we tend to understand his
behaviour by noticing the external circumstances which generated it.
• when an “enemy” behaves not correctly, we believe that it is his true
nature at play.

23. BENEFITS OF MEDITATION IN
YOUR LIFE
• Emotions like Love, Hatred, Compassion, Jealousy, Joy have
different impacts on ourselves.
• When experimenting Joy for example, it is not rare to get a
feeling of warmth within our body, and we are open to the
outside world.
• On the other side, when we experiment Hatred, we usually feel
tense, restricted, our throat is tied.
• It is impossible to be angry outside and to feel really good inside.

24. BENEFITS OF MEDITATION IN
YOUR LIFE
• Thoughts generate Feelings and Feelings generate
actions.
• Would not it be nice to be able to select only the given
thoughts that make you feel happy and let go of the
others?
• By selecting our thoughts, we can change how we feel and
change ourselves (increasing our empathy and
compassion for example). Compassion = Strength

25. SHOULD I DO IT?

26. SHOULD I DO IT?
• A lot of people that I talk to say they are not willing to meditate, because
they do not want to change. They need to be accepted as they are.
• This view as seeing ourselves as an isolated, permanent thing is flowed.
Almost nothing of who you were at 5 years old is still you: your body fully
regenerated, your feeling, emotions, behaviour are different. That’s One
of the Three Marks of Existence: aniccā. Every thing is impermanent.
• Secondly, no-one can really argue they are behaving the best possible
way, there’s always room for improvements.
• Finally, it is not because something is natural that it is always good.
Humans naturally get diseases: it does not prevent us from trying to find
cures.

27. EXPERIENCE DOING A
VIPASSANA RETREAT

28. EXPERIENCE DOING A
VIPASSANA RETREAT
• 10 days living an experience similar to Monks
doing between 5 and 10 hours of meditation a day.
• Segregation between male and female.
• Two Vegetarian meals a day.
• No Books, no movies, no music.
• Absolute Silence.

29. EXPERIENCE DOING A
VIPASSANA RETREAT
• One should not seek for those, as this will bring thoughts and judgment
which will make the practice harder. However, this is what I experienced:
• Could vividly feel any parts of my body by bringing my attention to it.
• Could remember all my dreams, every night. Could notice I was in a
dream.
• Experienced the difference between pain and suffering which helps
me in Freediving.
• Education: found it hard to realise that the whole field of mind training
was completely unknown to me at 30 years old. Need to educate.
• But Education here is only talking about the subject, it is not practicing.

30. SOME REFERENCES
• The Art of Meditation - Matthieu RICARD (Book)
• http://www.amazon.com/Art-Meditation-Matthieu-Ricard/dp/
0857892746
• Buddhism and Modern Psychology - Online course from Princeton
University by the excellent Robert Wright:
• https://www.coursera.org/learn/science-of-meditation/
• 7 takeaways after a 10 days Vipassana retreat:
• https://medium.com/@opichon/7-takeaways-after-a-10-days-
vipassana-retreat-ac44511b0dcb#.dikrwp2gk