> You can't Zen Buddhism your way out of the fact that you're going to spending years and years practicing until your fingers bleed, or until you're completely exhausted, etc.
Many Zen Buddhists know how long and hard practice for mastery is. Practicing meditation is in many ways skill acquisition as well, which is why it is called a practice.
You’ll of course be spending years and years practicing programming, and the insight that ego identification gets in the way and one must practice beginners mind is a simple yet deep understanding that comes from years and years of practice.
> You’ll of course be spending years and years practicing programming
You can't just 'of course' this! I mean, you can, but that's the whole point. If you, or anyone reading this enough cares enough about being a great programmer, you wouldn't be on this site in the first place. Which is fine, I enjoy wasting time on here as much as anyone. But the people who are actually really good at programming? They're not reading blogs about ego. They're not writing blogs about ego. They're programming.
Look at what Fabrice Bellard has accomplished in the last 20 or so years: https://bellard.org/ . QEMU, FFMPEG. I will never even be close to the level that he is. I'm much closer in relative skill to the person who just wrote their first hello world yesterday, and I've been programming for 15 years or so. And that's totally fine with me. Programming is not my only interest in life.
For the blog author, it seems that they're searching for a reason that they're not as good at programming as they think should be. I mean, he's already a Staff Engineer at Circle CI. He's not someone who's been programming for a year. It's very possible that's he pretty close to being as good as he'll ever be. Sure, he'll keep improving, but he'll never be Fabrice Bellard. If he was, he already would be and wouldn't be writing a blog about why he's not.
So what I would say to him is: that's fine! Life is not just programming. "The Second Truth is that this suffering is caused by selfish craving and personal desire." You wrote an article about how your ego gets in the way of you becoming a better programmer, but its your ego that makes you want to be a better programmer in the first place!
Many Zen Buddhists know how long and hard practice for mastery is. Practicing meditation is in many ways skill acquisition as well, which is why it is called a practice.
You’ll of course be spending years and years practicing programming, and the insight that ego identification gets in the way and one must practice beginners mind is a simple yet deep understanding that comes from years and years of practice.