I hereby declare that I started my research on programming psychology. It doesn't have a clearcut definition yet but there is probably a common understanding what it could mean. Software engineers prefer to talk about... er... software. They may even talk about how much they love or hate a notion, such as a programming language or a framework. They will list certain attributes to justify their love or hate but they rarely talk about their emotions per se. As one of my co-worker half-jokingly put it, he doesn't share more of his emotions because he doesn't have that much. So the psychology of programming deals with issues programmers don't deal with.
I have two goals with this research. First, I want to get into the top ten of some area. Since I avoid competition, it has to be some really weird area where there aren't many competitors. I also want this area to include as much of my skills and interests as possible. There are many awesome programmers. There are plenty of great psychotherapists. But there are really only a handful of people who are good programmers
and good psychotherapists at the same time. That's my territory.
My other goal is to expand programming experience to include other sides of human nature. There is some talk about coding as an art, being in the zone, the importance of having fun while coding, etc. Some programmers even go to coding dojos or retreats or record a screencast of their performing a kata. My dream is that one day programmers will code love poems to their partner, dance a difficult algorithm to fully grasp it and meditate at the keyboard. One day a senior programmer will just set up a little game of castles and dragons and their junior will love to solve it which will be the resolution of an underlying software task. So my other goal is to make those days come a bit closer.
