The Spiritual Landscape of Programming

beginning to describe motions of the soul while programming

Last week, I mentioned the Vatican website and a Catholic comedian's call to try to fix it. We've made a smidge of progress on the problem before trying to get more attention on it. We've started up a repository of fixes - right now, just one broken link and an explanation - and we have a proxy server that can apply the specified changes to pages on demand - though it hasn't been tested at all and constantly breaks.

What I have found fruitful in this process is less the potential for a fixed website and more the juxtaposition of my mundane work (programming) with some spiritual end. When I am programming the next homework assignment for students, it is often counterproductive to judge my intentions and reflect on the motions of my soul (that's Ignatius's term) within that process. When working on this project, it is not only reasonable to do so, but I am often prompted by the content itself. 

I had an opportunity to reflect and shared on the Full Stack Theology Discord:

After I finished writing the Tornado server, I realized I am quite lacking in whatever virtue would keep me invested in a project like this long-term

Like I ran into several errors when just trying to get the homepage working - for example, tornado always adds content-type: text/html to each text-ish reply, and less of an error and more of a UX issue that things load SLOWLY (because I think I have files downloaded blocking) and because these were unanticipated issues, I'm quite unmotivated to pursue fixes for them

I am somewhat interested in the most obvious question here - what is that virtue, and how can I grow in it? - but my inability to answer that question is the real topic of this post. I have a lack of language - I get the sense there's a virtue there, but I don't know what to call it. To be fair, when would I have learned about it? I learned to program within a schooling tradition that has little concern for the virtues. 

Finding this language is part of the original motivation for Full Stack Theology. The "Full Stack" in Full Stack Theology is that the highly theological is integral to the highly practical and vice versa; it is also that we can grow in virtue and accept God's grace at every level in this stack, too.

The movement of my heart when programming something is a draw towards something good. What is that? How might I discern between pride and the rush of power, and the joy of creation? When I am saddened upon finding problems, what is that? Of course it is to some degree changing expectations - but does that mean my expectations are improper and should be purified in its own place? Is it acedia, "sadness in the face of a spiritual good"?

This language will come with thoughtfulness and practice. What motions of your heart have you felt recently when programming or otherwise using computing? How do you begin to describe them in the eyes of Faith?