How Do I Stay Happy as a Developer?

Hello, buzzdies! Among thousands of productivity tools, have you ever figured out the best one ever? I bet you haven’t but don’t worry I have, and it's...

Happiness!

Yes, you've read it right. Nothing is a better productivity tool than happiness, especially for programmers and developers. But the problem arises, how do you stay happy with those devil bugs and thousand lines of code? Modern problems require modern solutions! 😉

1. Working on a Great Project

This one can be quite obvious but programmers love great projects. In fact, if they find that the project is not that appealing, they won’t take it, unless there are no more free projects to participate in. Yes, we’re all the same.

If you find a project that you’re capable of but not interested in, I highly recommend you just ignore it. I know, you think that it's impractical when this project pays you a higher amount. But trust me, it may harm your whole career. Since you’re not that happy with the project, you won’t be able to deliver it to the best quality, and the client may be unhappy and unimpressed. Once he gives a bad review, everything you have done before is gone.

Imagine you work with something you absolutely adore, you love the area, you love your team and a set of technologies is amazing. Over time you know almost every aspect of your project, and you started to call it your baby. What’s better than it huh? The more you’re happy with the project, the more productive you are!

2. Building strong bonds with your team.

Software development is much better as a team sport. One alone just cannot do much, plus it can get boring. It’s true that I work solo currently but that’s all because I didn’t find a better team that matches me. But I wish I had at least one tech mate that really fits me.

Therefore, try to be as much as comfortable as you can with the team you're working on. Any social skill you can apply here will be good. Here are some tips that I wish my former teammates had and will be great to have in you too!

Learn to take/give feedback: Nothing can be more annoying than someone putting down your work. Never try to do such things and give constructive feedback. I have been an avid reader of Ajahn Brahm's Dhamma Talks and I found a great technique that can be used to give better feedback called the "Sandwich Technique". That way, you first tell them something good like "I really like the way you code, it's simple and easy to figure out". And then the bad thing you want to tell just like "But those comments need to be somewhat clearer." And again, something good such as "By the way, I love the naming of your variables and functions. Unlike me, they are very relatable". And Ta-da! You have made sandwich feedback.
Practice team building activities: It's really a pleasure to see many companies have done great in this. It can be as much little as a Tea party on Fridays or as big as traveling abroad with the whole team!
Thank someone every day: This is a positive thinking technique that could apply to anything in your life. Send a message, email, or whatever to a colleague thanking him/her, even for very small things, such as giving a little review for a part of your code or something like that.

3. Saying “NO”

When you are doing really great work on your project, there will be a number of people who will come and ask you to join their team, startup, or whatever.

When you have the power to say "No", it feels awesome, especially if you found out later that that project wasn’t successful after all. You are feeling happy just because you saved lots of headaches and sleepless nights.

4. Manage Your Time as well as Priorities

Life goes (it flies, actually) fast nowadays, so fast that we go faster with it. And we end up in a routine where we try to do too many things that we can manage to do. That makes us really over-demanding ourselves, leading to frustration and anxiety because of not completing the tasks, or doing them under much pressure for quite some time.

You want to prepare a talk, attend a meetup, keep your Open Source work, write on your blog, stay healthy practicing sports, hang out with friends, spend time with your family, run some side-project... and you work full time as well. Be careful, being too ambitious can turn against you.

Wondering what I do about it? Here you go!

Slow down and push the break: Minimize your task queue. Keep in mind it is better to do 2 things well than do 4 tasks badly and quickly.
Enjoy what you do: When you slow down, you have more time to pay attention to what you're doing, making it more enjoyable. That's what mindfulness stands for.
Use a time management technique: I love to use Pomodoro. The point is to enforce breaks to move and distract yourself to don't spend hours on a task continuously.

Oh by the way, did you know that I use my own Pomodoro application? I am! See how it was built.

Conclusion

Phew, that’s a lot of words! Here we talked about a lot, including the importance of working as a team, the sandwich technique, managing your time etc. I hope you enjoyed it!

Ugh, I’m gonna miss it again. Here are some methods to keep your motivation at the full level!

Go Open Source: Now is easier than ever since an open-source guide has been created by GitHub itself and lots of experienced OSS devs. I've started doing it and got much good feedback from my project users! Not to mention the feeling when you're doing something other people find useful
Go to Meetups and Conferences: You'll meet lots of people physically, which opens a lot of doors and keeps you connected to more communities and its ecosystem. If you're brave enough to speak in one, you'll get a great feeling afterward, so go and try and see what it feels like!
Build side projects: It can be anything, such as building dummy apps, organizing events, sharing knowledge, creating libraries, etc. Some things I did is create this blog, contribute to some open-source projects, build the Buzz App, and read Dhamma talks of the Buddhist monk, Ajahn Brahm.

Happy Coding!

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