If you are a developer, you might consider taking up birdwatching, and vice versa. Here’s why:
Teaching and Learning
Birding and coding are both solitary pursuits that you can also do with others. Both birders and coders are helpful teachers. If you’re in a group and you’re not getting it, someone will jump in and help you, to make sure you see the bird or get the code.
There is an endless amount to learn in both fields. In software engineering, we have different languages, frameworks, hosting solutions, front ends, back ends, acronyms, etc., with new things being created continuously. Whether or not you manage to learn the 993 different bird species in North America, you’ll want to go to Ecuador and see some of the 1,635 species there. You’ll learn about migration timing, identifying plant and tree species, and insect life cycles. Birdsong identification is another huge topic, and a make-or-break part of identifying species that look identical, but have different calls.
Identification Skills
If you’re out in the field, you locate the desired bird with your naked eye and then, without moving, bring your binoculars up to your eyes to see it. That’s the same as using pry, console.log or another debugger to home in on where the error is, and then examine more closely to get the details.
Birding helps you develop your powers of observation. With experience, you can quickly ID a bird based on giss (general impression of size and shape), habitat, and markings that you learn to read instantly – literally on the fly. Debugging coding errors also requires a keen eye, to catch syntax errors, misspellings, etc.
A saying for birders who are trying to decide on an avian ID is, “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” That means you are probably not looking at a rare hawk that hasn’t been seen in your state since 1985; it’s likely a juvenile Red-tailed Hawk who doesn’t have its red tail yet. Likewise, your coding error is probably Googleable; your error has been found and solved before.
Gear
For coding, it helps to have a good laptop, a second monitor, a fancy desk chair, and comfortable headphones. But you can get by with much less than that as a beginner. Beginning birders need nothing but a decent pair of binoculars, often available on loan at an organized bird walk. If you have the means, you can also spend thousands on high-end binoculars, a spotting scope and tripod, and a fast-shutter-speed camera with a long lens.
Is there software for birding? Yes.
There are apps to help you learn and ID birds. I use this one because of its amazing search features. You can find birds and log your sightings here, in a crowdsourced scientific database to which you can contribute.
Birds of a Feather
Flatiron grad and birder Travis Petersen sums it up this way: “…since birding is like coding in these respects, birding offers opportunities to practice skills that are applicable to coding, and vice versa. I think abstracting such skills from a specific pursuit helps me understand them better, and being able to apply them in different contexts increases my mastery of them. I know that as I’ve gained more experience applying different design concepts and principles in various frameworks/languages, I’ve felt more comfortable with my understanding of them each time.”