Your Emotional API

I always appreciated, that mental well-being is something people in tech are concerned about. Meaning that at conferences once in a while you’ll see a talk about mental illnesses, depression and how it affects programmers. First time I noticed it was a big thing seeing this is a topic one can talk about. Second time it gave me a moment to talk about it with my co-workers.

I never figured out, if mental deseases are in particular a problem of people working with computers or is it more that there are strong communities and conferences in tech, so there are more chances to make those topics visible.

By far the best talk I saw is “Hacking your Emotional API” by John Sawers, here a version of it at RubiConf:

I just like the notion of having a way to think about feelings with the concepts and visual tools you know from programming. Maybe it’s not working for every one, but it’s working for John.

The whole talk is worth looking! It is important being able to express your feelings and to know a way how to deal with them. If you don’t have that, it will have negative impacts on your cognitive abilities, the ones you highly depend on as a programmer. And John explains some ways how to approach these things and how to practice.

This is day 42 of my #100daystooffload series, a challenge to write 100 blog posts in a year.