

Meditation Driven Development (2009) - nvader
http://www.ckwop.me.uk/Meditation-driven-development.html

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mbrock
The Zen Master Foyan (12th century China) wrote:

“Buddhism is an easily understood, energy-saving teaching; people strain
themselves. Seeing them helpless, the ancients told people to try meditating
quietly for a moment. These are good words, but later people did not
understand the meaning of the ancients; they went off and sat like lumps with
knitted brows and closed eyes, suppressing body and mind, waiting for
enlightenment. How stupid! How foolish!”

I think you could find lots of interesting parallels between software
development and religion. To a first approximation, it's all about old guys
giving advice that's misunderstood and channeled into various schemes like
consultancies and conferences and churches.

~~~
cheatsheet
I only read the end of the article, but it seems the author agrees with you.

> Don't fall in to Tim's trap. Great developers create great software not
> because they follow the strictures of some methodology but because they are
> truly great, gifted artisans.

But I think this concept of self knowledge is integral to Buddhism at the
least, and I know understanding it can be part of swallowing an iron hot ball
in zen.

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Toine
I agree with the general idea behind this article, which is : don't become
religious about one method, one tool, one language...

However, the conclusion is really pessimistic !

"Great developers create great software not because they follow the strictures
of some methodology but because they are truly great, gifted artisans."

So...non-gifted artisans will never produce great software ? We shouldn't try
to increase the average quality of software by figuring out methods that work
for the rest of us that are not "gifted" ?

~~~
andy_ppp
So a buddhist monk walks up to a hotdog vendor and is asked what he wants to
eat:

"Make me one with everything!" the Monk chuckles with a cheeky smile.

So the buddhist gets his hot dog and pays the hot dog vendor with a $20 bill.
The vendor takes the money and expecting change the buddhist asks what is
going on?

The smile is returned by the hotdog vendor; "Change must come from within".

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peterjancelis
There's also the Hawthorne effect you can enjoy just by being vocal about your
(random) methodology
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect)

------
factorialboy
Meditation does help in various aspects of life, including programming, but it
disappoints me to see many people looking at meditation in a limited scope.

On the other hand, I realize that this is how many millions across the world
get introduced and hopefully some of these millions will discover there is
more.

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eCa
While this has its points there is something missing.

Why were Tim's (and his group's) projects failing before they sdopted MDD?
Were many of them new at the company? Did they have a bad manager that left as
they started MDD?

If their new methology is bogus something else must have changed.

~~~
sparkslabs
In the story as given, it says many of Tim's projects etc failed before they
adopted MDD. What happened was Tim changed to being a manager (after 15 years
dev experience) _and_ formed a new team _and_ adopted MDD. They then
attributed to MDD the success, when in fact the success was due to people.

This point is emphasised again later when he finds a new team in his org when
MDD is failing. That team has a new manager (with 15 years dev experience),
working with a new team and a new methodology QDD. Again, the team attributes
success to QDD, not the people.

ie the success is down to people, not the process.

If you realise MDD (and QDD) is completely made up, that will probably explain
things somewhat. Also subsitute MDD with Agile, and realise that Agile was
created under similar circumstances and you'll probably get the point.

:-)

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nvader
Fascinating parable about how "Software Movements" get started. Although, even
if the initial effect observed is due to some sort of placebo effect, it might
be worth it.

~~~
mod
I didn't find it fascinating, but I think the point of the article wasn't that
it's a placebo effect, but rather the meditation had nothing to do with it.
The group was a hand-selected group of high-quality developers and they were
going to do excellently with or without the meditation.

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pandeiro
From the title, I thought there might be something insightful about the
importance and difficulty of maintaining _concentration_ when working with the
large, complex, abstract and mostly invisible structures that software
consists of.

Instead it was just another riff on "we're doing it wrong"...

~~~
nvader
Perhaps you may have missed this HN post, which may interest you more:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9104759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9104759)

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motles
I enjoyed this

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joe563323
Nailed it.

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codecondo
Garbage. The thought of letting his team know about meditation was one-sided,
it is what happens when you begin to meditate; you want everyone else to do
it, too. And while that isn't a necessarily bad thing, this post is missing a
lot of facts - how did the team respond to meditation on a personal level, how
he managed to get everyone to meditate for 45 minutes out of the blue, and how
many of people continued to use meditation all together; if any at all?

Like I said, garbage.

