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:
- Call our Google Voice at at +1 (929)500-1513 and leave a message by 4/22 📞
- Send a voice memo to pod@dev.to 🎙
- OR, if you don't want your voice recorded...just leave a comment here and we'll read your response aloud for you 🗣
Thank you!
Latest comments (31)
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.
Playing Magic: the Gathering is my primary (and only?) "networking" that I do for my career.
In the Seattle area two nerdy things are big: programming and MtG. Doctors and lawyers have the golf course clubhouse; programmers have their local game store. 😄 You'd be hard-pressed to find a tournament where there isn't someone who works at Amazon, Facebook, Google or is running a start-up.
I'm owner of a Netlabel, free music for free music. Take a look monofonicos.net/
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.
Sowing tracktion kites. The paraglider kind with ribs and cells.
It take a whole lot of planning in advance in wich order all the layers go on top. Also: you only get one chance at sowing because the fabric gets punctured and you don't want a perforated kite.
So laying out my next steps became second nature.
Reading, for sure. Doing math riddles, and working out. That helped me in many ways when working with code.
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...
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.
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.
For me, it has to be reading.
I feel that I gain some energy while reading a book at work, especially if I just let myself enjoy the book and not caring about anything else. I bring my book to work all the time! I tend to read during breakfast and lunch.
After those periods, I come back into the office raring to go. 👊
Skateboarding. Break the code, get up and try it again. And again. And again, until you land it. Then go bigger, then add a set of stairs, then break your ankle, then do it again!
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 🙄
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!
Whenever I learn something new(regarding web development), I love to write a post on that. Doing this helps me to know more about that topic. That is one of the reasons why I'm here at dev.to.
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.