Meditations in Code–Applying Stoic Philosophy and the Bhagavad Gita to Software

Author here. I've been a developer for 20+ years and have been practicing Stoicism and studying the Bhagavad Gita for most of them. This is a weekly series that applies both traditions to the actual daily reality of building software — not as inspirational platitudes, but as practical frameworks for production incidents, code reviews, career decisions, team dynamics, and burnout.

The two traditions converge more than you'd expect. Marcus Aurelius's dichotomy of control maps directly to the Gita's karma yoga. The Gita's "lamp in a windless place" is the best description of flow state I've ever read. Both were written by people under extreme pressure making high-stakes decisions — which, depending on your on-call rotation, you might relate to quite a bit.

The first 5 weeks are free. The writing style is... opinionated. There are jokes. Some of them are about Kubernetes.

Happy to answer questions about the series, the philosophy, or why I think the tech industry desperately needs frameworks for the inner life that aren't just "practice gratitude and drink more water."