Two years ago I published the first post on this site. It was short, slightly anxious in tone, and said something like: software development is not just a technical discipline, and I want to explore what it means to do this work sustainably, as a whole person.
I did not know if anyone would find that interesting. As it turned out, a lot of people did.
What Two Years Has Taught Me
The main thing: the need is real and underserved.
There is no shortage of content about how to code better — frameworks, languages, architecture patterns, interview preparation. There is very little content about how to remain functional as a human being while doing all of that. How to manage the cognitive load of sustained technical work. How to maintain relationships outside work when the work is always mentally present. How to sustain the energy and curiosity that made you choose this field in the first place without burning it down in a decade.
The response to this site has confirmed, repeatedly, that these questions matter to people and that they are not being answered well elsewhere. The posts that have resonated most have not been the technical ones. They have been the ones about rest, about starting over, about the gap between what we tell ourselves about productivity and what actually produces good work over time.
What the Content Shows
Looking back at two years of posts, some patterns are clear.
The practical beats the inspirational. Posts that give a specific practice — how to start meditation, a heuristic for knowing when to stop working, a particular way to structure a talk — consistently outperform posts that explore a concept without a practical anchor. People who come here are not looking for motivational content. They are looking for things to try.
The personal resonates more than I expected. The posts where I was most honest about my own failures and confusions have been the most shared. This surprised me at first. It should not have. Honesty about difficulty is rarer than technical accuracy, and people recognise it when they see it.
The mind-body intersection is genuinely underexplored. I came to this site thinking I was covering fairly obvious ground — of course developers need to take care of themselves, of course mental health matters, of course rest is real. What I found is that the specific intersection of technical work and wellbeing practice — how meditation affects focus, how sleep debt manifests in code quality, how the stress physiology of public speaking relates to the physiology of debugging under pressure — is not covered with any rigour anywhere I could find. That gap is the real opportunity here.
The Community
My blogging experience has let me meet many great people and expand my horizons considerably. The best part has been the ability to share content in the form of stories.
I have heard from developers at all stages of career — early-career people trying to establish sustainable habits before the bad ones take hold; mid-career people trying to recover from periods of overwork; senior developers trying to articulate something they have learned the hard way and want to pass forward.
I have heard from people who started meditation because of something they read here. People who gave their first conference talk after reading the speaker resources post. People who changed how they structure their workday based on something about rest and attention. That kind of impact is genuinely difficult to measure and genuinely real.
The most meaningful conversations have been the ones where someone pushed back — where they disagreed with something I wrote, explained why, and the disagreement led somewhere more interesting than the original post. The site has gotten better because of those exchanges.
What Surprised Me
How technical it turned out to be possible to go.
I started this site thinking I would keep it primarily conceptual — principles and practices, not code. What happened is that the technical and the human kept intersecting in ways that required engaging with both. You cannot write seriously about developer wellness without writing about how memory works, how attention degrades under load, what the research on sleep and cognitive performance actually shows. You cannot write about functional programming resources without talking about why learning a new paradigm is a particular kind of cognitive challenge.
The audience for this site turned out to be people who want both: the technical substance and the human context. That shaped everything about how I write now.
The other surprise: how much writing has clarified my own thinking. I came to posts with what I thought were settled views and found, in the writing, that the views were settled only on the surface. The discipline of making an argument publicly — having to anticipate objections, provide evidence, be clear about what you actually mean — is not just an act of communication. It is an act of thinking.
Two Years In: What This Site Is
Looking back at the full archive, what MindBodySoulDeveloper is, is an argument. Not a loud argument — a sustained, evidence-based one.
The argument is that the separation between "technical developer" and "whole person" is artificial and costly. That the practices which make a developer more functional as a human — adequate sleep, regular physical movement, some form of attention training, an honest relationship with rest and recovery — also make them better at the actual work. Not as a side effect, but directly. The mind that meditates is better at sustained attention. The body that moves regularly maintains the metabolic health that supports cognitive performance. The developer who writes about their thinking develops clearer thinking.
This is not woo. It is, increasingly, what the research shows. The challenge is making the case in a way that lands for people who are sceptical of anything that sounds like self-help — which is a reasonable scepticism — while still being practical enough to actually influence what people do on Tuesday morning.
That challenge has kept the writing interesting for two years. I expect it to keep it interesting for considerably longer.
What Is Next
More of the same, with more confidence.
I want to write more about the research — the actual neuroscience and psychology behind the practices I discuss, not just the practices themselves. I want to interview more people who are doing this well and learn from how they think. I want to be more honest about where I am still figuring things out.
I also want to write more about the intersection of FP, type systems, and the cognitive patterns they develop — that ground has been productive and I have only scratched the surface.
The goal has not changed from year one: to be a resource for developers who understand that the mind, the body, and the soul are not separate from the work — that they are the medium through which the work gets done, and that taking care of them is not a distraction from technical excellence but a prerequisite for it.
Thank you to everyone who has read, responded, and shared. The conversation is the best part of this.
Here is to year three.