DEV is in the process of launching a podcast and we'd love for you to be involved! We're recording the episodes in advance, and this week we'd like to know:
What are some of your hobbies outside of coding that have directly or indirectly helped your dev work?
If you'd like to participate, please:
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Top comments (32)
Reading books about biology, especially about the human, bonobo, chimpanzee and other animals behavior, and how science explain it. That books have been helping me to change my mind and improving my soft skills, and of course work more productive with other people.
I live in probably the best state for hiking ⛰ and have road tripped around great views. Just observing nature and processes in society. Stoic philosophy type books and ideas. Trying to do the hippie meditation thing now 😉
I'm only about 6 months away from confirming to myself that we live in a universe simulation and I want out of the current code being run 😂
Design and dev tend to go hand in hand, so having a design background has been helpful. Being able to talk to both groups and get them on the same page, understanding each other had been a key part of my career so far. Understanding design principles can make you a better developer.
One of the obvious ones: Light exercise a few times a week.
Exercise has been proven to have benefits for pretty much everything, including better concentration and focus. I don't actually like exercise so I only do very little. But a little exercise is enough, and any dislike I have is definitely surpassed by the benefits it brings.
Hitting the road on my motorbike, I love to get out and explore. I've recently bought an old BMW tourer so that I can travel further in comfort. I'm really looking forward to this lockdown being lifted. And, of course there is a great community around biking where you can meet many people.
Improv theater has helped me in my professional career as well as just life in general. It teaches you how to get out of your head, have fun, and let yourself fail. Also, a side effect is being more confident speaking in front of people and collaborating in a team. Definitely recommend! Just remember that "improv" is a very broad concept, and differs from theater to theater, so feel free to explore if you are interested.
Industrial design. <3
It motivates me to present even prototypes in better light. Feels like one of things to return to after some routine work - result is always satisfactory when I pull some fantasy for logo design, let's say, upon another abbreviated pair. With industrial design and reusability in mind, every aspect of representation comes cleaner, that also helps to shape relevant thinking 🙄
Playing rugby. I met so many people through university and club rugby and a lot of my early job opportunities were thanks to people I knew in rugby land.
Playing capoeira and doing free movement helps me clear my mind after a hard day's work. Studying and practising design on my own also helped a lot when coding UIs.
Penetration testing.
It's a completely different animal compared to software development; in software development you're creating stuff, in pentesting you're breaking stuff. But it's really helped me learn a lot of concepts and technologies more deeply.
It also forces me to prioritize security in every step of the development lifecycle and to understand the ROI of each measure taken.
Architecture because it is the school of project management, of combining artistical and technical approch, of understanding the desire of the customer and design, of interactions between the creation and its user, of building blocks and using the same materials to create something new...
Meditation and learning about neuroscience, attention, focus and flow. Also writing blogs - it's great for helping me organise and plan information, and be sure about what I want to say, which applies to code too!
I make music as a hobby. And just earlier, I went live on Facebook to create a beat. I'm trying to be consistent so I'll probably go live everyday to make music aside from live coding.
Reading books (and especially graphic novels) helps me take my mind out of the dev process, get refreshed, and refocus. Another thing that I find relaxing is doing cross-stitch. It is really simple, involves some creativity, and it is like offline pixel-art.
Board games and game theory.
In life there are rules, formal, unwritten, or natural. If you learn to work them, you succeed. If not, you bang into them and receive the equal-and-opposite reaction.
This has helped me think strategically in all manner of things, especially interpersonal interactions, but also in product management and (in my own trivial examples) coding - cost benefit analyses, heuristics for problem solving, even bug hunting.