Being mindful in application development - finding satisfaction when it is hard to find.

Most organizations invest in application development to realize values in cost savings and efficiency gain. Therefore, a business concentrates on developing applications faster in a cost-effective manner, wants to engage its users with the applications and reduce maintenance costs. While achieving all these sounds like a fantastic idea - with an ever-growing number of business applications for large organizations, how does it achieve this?

So, over time various coding frameworks and development best practice guidelines have evolved. Many businesses have adopted frameworks, methodologies, and prepared guidelines and yet achieving consistency and cost reduction in application development appear to be a daunting task.

Now, here is the catch. A development team consists of many developers from many backgrounds and many of them have different thoughts. Humans by nature are self-centered and the applications development space is no different. Each engineer has his / her own view of how things should work, what is the best way to achieve a goal, how to throw an error to name a few. Many of us conclude that our way is the best way or try to preserve the knowledge to self from a sense of job insecurity.

Since in most businesses, Information Technology is an essential tool to "doing the business" - it is imperative for developers to find a sense of belonging to the organization rather than just being a service provider. When you realize that you belong to a group of nice coworkers and align with the principles of the business, this is when you produce the most and deliver your best product.

Easy said, but how does one achieve this? You may think, no-one cares about me? Why should I bother! It is hard to get along with people! What is there in it for me!

The answer is, there is a lot in it for you. You go to work to achieve a sense of purpose and you want to create something meaningful and contribute to the unfolding of the organization. You want to pay your bills by doing a job as well as find satisfaction.

So, keeping your coworkers in mind when developing applications is the key. What does that even mean? When you are writing code, let's keep our coworkers in mind

• Can they understand what I am writing? Am I leaving notes for them in my code?
• Is my flow of code easily understandable? If yes, the next developer will struggle less, meaning I am being kind to him/her and the organization is saving money.
• It is a good idea to get a peer review done, there is no shame in gaining more knowledge from a colleague.
• Let's be mindful that someone else may want to have a look at this organizational IP while you are away, so why not discuss a common coding style or follow a template.

When you are mindful of others while coding, specifically your coworkers, you will find that your code is becoming more like a book. As well as it is providing the required functionality, it is telling some sort of stories. Stories are powerful, it creates long term impact in mind.

By practicing mindfulness and storytelling when writing code - you achieve amazing results. You find a purpose in your work, you achieve a sense of belonging - overall you steal away the satisfaction you deserve that otherwise, it is very difficult to achieve.

Photo by LagosTechie on Unsplash