Is zen philosophy practical in real life?

I have recently read something about Zen and software development, since one of our products, ZenTao project management software, is actually the reflection of Zen philosophy.

what’s this Zen thing? The word can be approximately translated as “absorption” or “meditative state”. And indeed meditation (zazen) plays a large role in Zen practicing, but Zen practitioners are also all about getting involved in things directly.

This quote is from The Zen principle applied in Software written by Nikos Andriotis. I love this article which is absolutely an overview of Zen philosophy in software design. It further explains the design and development of software with concepts in Zen.

We could replace the words “thinking” and “doing” with the words “theory” and “practice”, or “design” and “development”, and we already have a valuable lesson from this Zen thing: you can’t really separate those two things.

Our team is greatly inspired by Zen philosophy. ZenTao is practical and pragmatic, which reflects the principle of simplicity in Zen. It has robost features and easy to operate. Zentao is well structured and can be flexibly extended.

Zen(禅) and Tao(道) are the two Chinese characters that have rich meanings in both religion and culture. ZenTao takes the cultural meaning of Zen and Tao, and is expected to convey our understanding and thinking of management. Inspired by The Tao of Programming and The Zen of Programming, we named our software ZenTao.