Welcome to Meditations in Code
What Marcus Aurelius Knew About Your Deployment Pipeline
Oh — before we start: it’s Meditations *in* Code, not Meditations *on* Code. Someone will ask. Someone always asks. The “in” is deliberate. “On” would mean code is the subject, like I’m going to spend three years analyzing your architecture patterns from a safe philosophical distance. I am not. “In” means code is the setting — you’re meditating from inside the chaos, the same way Marcus Aurelius journaled from inside a military camp during a literal plague, not from a comfortable study writing thoughtful essays about plagues he’d read about. He was in it. You’re in it. We’re all in it. The code is where we live. The philosophy is what keeps us from losing our minds there. Anyway.
You’re staring at a failed build at 11 PM on a Thursday. Slack is lighting up. Your manager — who was “just checking in, no pressure!” three messages ago and is now typing in all caps — is asking for an update. The fix is somewhere in a dependency chain you didn’t write, barely understand, and whose README was last updated during the Obama administration. You have mass-selected fifteen browser tabs as though closing them might solve the problem. You’ve restarted Docker twice because restarting Docker is the software equivalent of blowing on a Nintendo cartridge — you can’t explain why it sometimes works, but you’re not above trying.
In that moment, absolutely nobody is thinking about philosophy.
But maybe they should be. Because a Roman emperor who governed during a literal plague, led a war he didn’t want, and managed an empire that was actively falling apart — basically the ancient equivalent of inheriting a production system with no documentation — had a framework for exactly this kind of Thursday.
What This Is
Nearly two thousand years ago, a Roman emperor sat in a military camp on the Danube frontier and wrote notes to himself. Not a leadership manual. Not a self-help book. Not a Medium article titled “5 Ways I Conquered Gaul and What It Taught Me About Product-Market Fit.” Just reminders — short, honest, sometimes frustrated entries about how to think clearly, act with integrity, and keep going when everything is difficult. Essentially a private Slack channel with one member and no emoji reactions.
Those notes became the Meditations, one of the most enduring works of practical philosophy ever written. They also have an energy that is remarkably similar to commit messages written at 1 AM: terse, self-directed, and occasionally pleading. “Stop being angry at people” is a thing Marcus Aurelius actually wrote to himself, repeatedly, which is also a thing I have written in my own journal, in a notebook I keep near my laptop for moments when I want to type something in Slack that I will later regret.
Around the same time — and centuries earlier, on the other side of the world — a warrior named Arjuna stood paralyzed on a battlefield, overwhelmed by the weight of what he had to do. He had the ancient equivalent of a freeze response. His charioteer, who happened to be God (a detail you’d think would make the situation less stressful, but somehow made it more), didn’t tell him to relax, take a walk, or practice mindful breathing. Krishna told him something far more precise: act fully, with your whole being, but release your grip on what happens next.
That conversation became the Bhagavad Gita, one of humanity’s deepest explorations of duty, action, and meaning. It’s also the longest and most effective pep talk in recorded history. Eighteen chapters. On a battlefield. With armies waiting. Krishna had the energy of a tech lead who pulls you into a one-on-one right before a deployment window and says, “I know the timing isn’t great, but this is important.”
Meditations in Code is a weekly series that brings these two traditions — Stoic philosophy and the wisdom of the Gita — into the world of software development. Not as motivational posters. Not as LinkedIn platitudes. (”Grateful to announce that I’ve embraced impermanence. Thrilled to share that nothing matters. Please like and subscribe.”) But as practical frameworks for the actual challenges you face: production incidents, code reviews, career decisions, team dynamics, technical debt, and the quiet, 2 AM question of whether any of this actually matters or whether you should have just gone to veterinary school like your mother suggested.
Who This Is For
This series is for professional software developers — the people who write code, review code, ship code, debug code, and occasionally wonder why they chose this career at 2 AM during an incident while their partner asks, from the doorway, in a voice calibrated to communicate both concern and disappointment, “Are you coming to bed or are you still fighting with that container?”
More specifically, it’s for:
- Mid-to-senior developers who’ve been in the industry long enough to know that “move fast and break things” is less a philosophy and more a description of what happens when you skip staging
- Tech leads and architects who’ve discovered that the hardest problems aren’t technical — they’re the meeting after the meeting about the meeting where someone asks “can we take this offline?” which just means scheduling another meeting, which is apparently what we do now, we meet about meetings
- Engineering managers who still think like engineers, still occasionally open a PR at 10 PM because they miss writing code, and want a framework for the human side that isn’t just another book with the word “radical” in the title
- Anyone in tech who suspects there’s more to professional life than sprints, standups, and story points — and who has, at least once, named a variable `finalVersion_REAL_v2_USE_THIS_ONE`, felt nothing, and then named the next one `finalVersion_REAL_v2_USE_THIS_ONE_ACTUALLY`
You don’t need any background in philosophy. Every concept is explained from scratch. You don’t need to have read Marcus Aurelius or the Bhagavad Gita — though by Week 20 or so, you’ll probably find yourself adding one to your cart at 11 PM, which is, statistically, when developers make their most ambitious personal improvement purchases. Right between the ergonomic keyboard and the book about Rust you’ll definitely read this time.
What You’ll Get
Every week, a new post that follows a simple structure:
1. A quote — from Marcus Aurelius and the Bhagavad Gita, setting up the week’s theme. Two ancient voices saying essentially the same thing from opposite ends of the world, which either proves that truth is universal or that the human condition has always been this annoying.
2. The concept — the philosophical idea, explained clearly, no jargon, no prerequisites. If you can understand a function signature, you can understand Stoicism. Honestly, Stoicism is simpler. It has fewer edge cases.
3. The application — how it applies to real software development, with specific scenarios you’ll recognize and possibly feel personally attacked by. This is not a coincidence. I’ve been in your meetings. Not literally. But spiritually, yes.
4. The practice — 2-4 concrete things you can do this week to put it into action. Not “meditate for an hour.” Not “rewrite your life.” More like “try this one specific thing on Monday and see what happens.” The difficulty level is roughly “writing a unit test” — not hard if you actually do it, almost impossible if you keep saying you’ll get to it later.
5. A reflection — a journal prompt to take the idea deeper, if you want to. Optional but recommended. Think of it as a `TODO` comment for your inner life, except unlike your actual `TODO` comments, someone might follow up on these.
Each post takes about 10-15 minutes to read. The goal isn’t to make you a philosopher. (If it were, I’d charge more and assign readings.) It’s to give you a framework that helps you think more clearly, suffer less unnecessarily, do better work, and find meaning in the daily grind of building software. Which, let’s be honest, could use some meaning beyond “the Jira board said so” and “we need this for Q3,” where Q3 is a concept that has somehow become load-bearing for the entire human enterprise.
Why Two Traditions?
Most writing about Stoicism for professionals stays within the Western canon — Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca. Maybe a Seneca quote on someone’s desk calendar. Maybe a Marcus Aurelius tattoo that they got after reading a Ryan Holiday book and a particularly rough Q4. That’s valuable, but it’s incomplete.
The Bhagavad Gita offers something Stoicism doesn’t: a fully developed philosophy of action — karma yoga, the yoga of work. When Krishna tells Arjuna “you have a right to your action, but not to the fruits of your action,” he’s not being vaguely inspirational. He’s describing, with surgical precision, what it means to do excellent work without being destroyed by attachment to outcomes. He’s describing what it looks like to ship a feature and genuinely not refresh the analytics dashboard every four minutes to see if anyone is using it. (I see you. I am also you.)
That’s not a Stoic idea. It’s a complement to Stoicism that makes both traditions stronger. Stoicism gives you the framework for thinking clearly. The Gita gives you the framework for acting fully. Together, they cover the two things that actually matter: your mind and your work. Which, incidentally, are the two things that tech culture is most effective at breaking.
Throughout this series, the two traditions talk to each other. Sometimes they agree. Sometimes they push in different directions. Sometimes one tradition answers a question the other one doesn’t even ask. The conversation between them is where the real insight lives. Think of it as pair programming across two thousand years and six thousand miles — except both programmers are ancient, neither one uses VS Code, and they agree on almost everything important while disagreeing on the metaphysics, which is, honestly, how most pair programming sessions go.
The Free Tier
Weeks 1-5 are free for all subscribers, plus a bonus article that I wrote because I have feelings about context switching and needed somewhere to put them. No credit card. No “free trial that auto-enrolls you into a subscription you’ll forget about until it shows up on your bank statement in November.” Just free. These six posts establish the foundational framework:
- Week 1: The Dichotomy of Control / Karma Yoga — the single most useful idea for surviving in this industry. If you read only one post, read this one. If you read only one post and it doesn’t change how you think about your work, I’ll be surprised and also slightly offended.
- Week 2: Impressions — those split-second reactions that hijack your thinking. The reason you read “can we chat?” on Slack and immediately assumed you were being fired.
- Week 3: The Inner Citadel — the retreat that’s always available, unlike your staging environment, which is currently down for reasons no one can explain and which, honestly, was never fully up in the first place.
- Week 4: Virtue as the Only Good — redefining what “success” actually means, which turns out to be more complicated than your compensation band and less complicated than your LinkedIn bio makes it sound.
- Week 5: The Discipline of Desire — learning to want the right things, which turns out to be the hardest skill in an industry that will dangle a new framework, a higher title, and a signing bonus in front of you roughly every eighteen months until you die or retire, whichever comes first.
- Bonus: The Cost of the Switch — a deeply personal and only slightly unhinged meditation on context switching, the people who inflict it upon you, and the passive-aggressive manager who says “no rush” while keeping a spreadsheet of your response times. This one is free because I need as many people as possible to read it. For reasons.
If these posts resonate, the rest of the series goes deeper — into the technical, the interpersonal, the ethical, and the existential.
Starting with Week 6, the series moves to paid subscribers only. I want to be upfront about this from the beginning, because surprise paywalls are the subscription equivalent of a `sudo rm -rf` you didn’t see coming — technically functional, universally unwelcome. The first five weeks give you the complete foundational framework. If those ideas are useful, the rest of the series is available through a paid subscription. If they’re not, you’ve lost nothing but a few Tuesday mornings, and you’ve gained a framework for thinking about control, impressions, virtue, and desire that you can use forever — no subscription required.
A handful of later posts — at key milestones throughout the series — will also be free, so you’ll hear from the series at key milestones regardless. Think of it as the cost of one mediocre lunch per month in exchange for a weekly framework for not losing your mind. The ROI is, frankly, absurd.
A Note on the Author
I should tell you two things about me before we go further. Consider this the informed consent portion of our relationship.
First, I have what can only be described as clinical-grade OCD about spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Commas haunt my dreams. I have lost sleep over an Oxford comma. I have reopened a published post at midnight to fix an em dash that was technically correct but felt wrong — and if you think that’s excessive, you should know that I then spent twenty minutes confirming it was, in fact, correct, closed the laptop, opened it again, and looked at the em dash one more time. Dangling modifiers cause me physical discomfort. Split infinitives make me twitch. If you find an error in these posts — a misplaced semicolon, an errant apostrophe, a sentence that ends with a preposition I didn’t authorize — congratulations. Genuinely. You’ve found something that slipped past a level of scrutiny that makes code review look like a casual glance. Frame it. Screenshot it. Tell people at parties. You’ve earned bragging rights that I will grudgingly and publicly acknowledge while privately losing my mind.
Second, I write the way I speak. This is a deliberate choice and also a personality trait I couldn’t fix if I tried and at this point have stopped trying. It means these posts will read like someone talking to you — complete with asides, sudden pivots, sentences that start with “and” or “but” despite what your eighth-grade English teacher said, and the occasional sentence fragment. For emphasis. Like that one. And this one. This style does not always go over well in professional settings. I have received feedback. Multiple times. From people who presumably meant well. The feedback has been noted. Filed. Considered with the gravity it deserves. The style persists.
If both of these things sound manageable, welcome. If one of them sounds intolerable, give it three weeks. If both of them sound intolerable, this may not be your blog, and that’s fine — there are several excellent Stoicism newsletters that maintain a much more dignified tone and also don’t make jokes about Kubernetes. You’ll be happier there. No hard feelings.
Why This Blog Exists
A reasonable question. The internet has roughly twelve billion articles about software development and at least four billion about Stoicism. Ryan Holiday alone accounts for approximately three billion of those. The Venn diagram of “people who quote Marcus Aurelius” and “people who deploy to production on a Friday” is already a circle. So why am I here, adding to the noise, like a developer opening yet another terminal tab they’ll never close?
A few reasons. Some selfish. Some noble. I’ll let you sort out which is which, because I genuinely can’t tell anymore.
I’ve been bitten. Not metaphorically. Not “oh, I’ve had some challenges in my career” bitten. I mean I have personally, with my own hands, at a time when those hands should have known better:
- Shipped a build so broken that the rollback also broke, and then the rollback of the rollback introduced a *new* bug, like some kind of fractal of poor judgment
- Been the one in the meeting explaining why the feature that was “definitely done” was, in fact, not done, and also why the demo environment was on fire, and also why I was sweating
- Run a find-and-replace across an entire codebase with the confidence of a man who has never been hurt before, and broken fourteen files, three of which I didn’t know existed and one of which turned out to be load-bearing
- Named a variable `temp_FINAL_v3_okSERIOUSLY_useThis` and felt nothing — not even shame, which in retrospect was the more concerning problem
- Questioned every career decision I ever made, mass-selected all my browser tabs, stared at the little “(87)” in the tab count, and thought “yes, this is fine, this is what success looks like”
All before lunch. On a Tuesday.
These posts aren’t theoretical. They’re field notes from someone who has made most of the mistakes described in them and then, in a moment of either wisdom or catastrophically misplaced confidence, decided to write about it. In public. For money.
I practice this. On purpose. I don’t write about Stoicism and Karma Yoga because they photograph well for LinkedIn. (”Grateful to announce that I have embraced impermanence. Thoughts?”) I write about them because I use them — during incidents, in one-on-ones, in the quiet after a hard week when you’re deciding whether to update your résumé or just update your perspective.
This isn’t a performance. It’s a practice. Writing about it keeps me honest, in the same way that having a gym membership you actually use keeps you honest. If I tell you to do the two-column exercise in Week 1, I’d better be doing the two-column exercise. And I am. Imperfectly, and often belatedly, and sometimes while muttering things Marcus Aurelius would not have approved of. But I am.
I need to write. This is the selfish one, so let me just be upfront about it. Some people run. Some people do CrossFit and then tell you about CrossFit. Some people are vegan and declare it to everyone they meet, several times. Some people play guitar in their garage at a volume that suggests they believe talent is measured in decibels. I write. I have always written. If I don’t write, the ideas accumulate in my head like unread Slack notifications — technically still there, increasingly urgent, accomplishing nothing — until my brain is basically an open-plan office where every thought is talking over every other thought and nobody has booked the conference room. (When I say slack, it doesn’t just mean Slack, it could be Teams, which is worse.)
This series is my outlet. You’re the beneficiary of my inability to sit quietly with an unwritten thought. You’re welcome. I’m sorry. Both of these are true.
I’m good at this. That’s not arrogance — that’s a claim, and I intend to back it up, which is more than can be said for most LinkedIn bios. I’ve spent years thinking about how philosophy applies to the daily reality of building software, and I’ve spent years learning how to write about technical work in a way that doesn’t make people fall asleep, feel patronized, or develop a sudden interest in checking their phone.
Not everyone can bridge the gap between a Roman emperor’s field journal and a thundering herd problem. Most people, when they try, produce something that reads like a fortune cookie got stuck in a CI/CD pipeline. I can do better than that. Whether I do is for you to judge, but I promise you it won’t be boring and it won’t be generic. If at any point this series starts to sound like “just be present and write clean code,” you have my permission to cancel your subscription and use the money on something more useful, like a second monitor or therapy.
The industry needs this. Okay, this is the reason that actually matters, so I’m going to stop being funny for a moment. I’ll go back to being funny afterward. Consider this the serious interlude, like the bridge in a pop song where the key changes and someone starts playing the piano.
Software development is full of smart, dedicated people who are quietly miserable. Burned out. Disillusioned. They’ve spent years building things that get canceled two sprints before launch, rewriting things that worked fine because someone attended a conference, and sitting through meetings that could have been — no, not an email — could have been nothing. Could have simply not existed. The meeting’s absence would have been the contribution.
When you become jaded. When you feel anger rising during a code review that says “have you considered...” for the fourth time. When you start questioning whether any of this work matters, whether you matter, whether the thing you’ve given your best years to deserves them — those aren’t weaknesses. Those are the moments that matter most. Those are precisely the moments where a framework for thinking clearly isn’t a luxury. It’s oxygen.
There are very few places in this industry that take the inner life of a developer seriously. Not “10 tips for productivity.” Not “how to crush your OKRs.” Not “this AI tool will replace you, also please subscribe to our AI tool.” The actual inner life — the doubt, the search for meaning, the quiet question of whether you’re spending your finite years well. Marcus Aurelius wrote about this. Krishna spoke about this. And almost nobody in tech talks about it honestly, because honestly doesn’t get engagement and engagement is apparently how we measure the value of ideas now, which is itself a topic for about four of these posts.
This blog talks about it. Honestly.
Writing is the practice. Marcus Aurelius didn’t write the Meditations for publication. He wrote them because the act of articulating what he believed but kept forgetting was itself the discipline. The man governed an empire and still needed to remind himself, in writing, to not be annoyed at people in the morning. If that’s not relatable, you’ve never opened Slack before 9 AM.
The Gita wasn’t delivered as a lecture to be filed away and referenced in next quarter’s planning — it was spoken on a battlefield, in the moment of crisis, because that’s when wisdom actually earns its name. This blog works the same way. Every week, I sit down and re-engage with ideas I already know but haven’t fully absorbed, because knowing something and living it are separated by a distance roughly equivalent to the gap between “it works on my machine” and “it works in production.”
You reading this is a welcome bonus. The practice of writing it is the point.
A Note on Honesty
This series doesn’t pretend that applying philosophy to software development is easy, or that reading a weekly post will solve your problems. If it were that simple, Marcus Aurelius would have written the Meditations once and moved on. Instead, he wrote the same reminders to himself over and over — “don’t get angry,” “you’re going to die,” “stop caring what people think” — like a man leaving sticky notes for a future version of himself who he knows, from extensive experience, will not listen. He was the emperor of Rome and he still couldn’t consistently follow his own advice. That should make all of us feel better and also slightly terrified.
Arjuna needed 18 chapters of divine teaching, a cosmic vision of all time and space, and a literal god explaining the nature of reality while two armies waited on either side of a battlefield before he could pick up his bow and do his job. Eighteen chapters. That’s a lot of chapters. If God Himself, in His universal form, radiating the light of a thousand suns, needed that much time to coach one very skilled warrior through a panic attack, I think we can be patient with ourselves when the two-column exercise doesn’t click by Tuesday.
The practice is hard. The practice is the point. If it were easy, it would be a listicle, not a series.
What I can promise is that the ideas are real, the scenarios are specific, and the advice is practical. No toxic positivity. No “just be grateful.” No “everything happens for a reason,” which is technically a Stoic-adjacent idea but the way most people use it makes Epictetus spin in his grave. No pretending that a framework for thinking replaces the difficulty of doing. No suggesting that you can think your way out of a system that is, in fact, genuinely broken and requires actual action to fix.
Just two ancient traditions, a lot of code, an uncomfortable amount of self-awareness, and an honest attempt to connect them in a way that might actually help.
Welcome to the practice. Grab a coffee. Or a tea. Or whatever you drink at the hour you usually question your career choices — that’s the target reading time.
Dedication
I dedicate this whole series to my Spiritual Preceptor, Sadguru Yogiraj Dr Mangeshda [mangeshda.org]. Without his divine presence in my life, I would not be here. He teaches the practice of Bhagavad Gita through Mahavatar Babaji’s Kriya Yoga, which I have been practicing under his guidance from 2002 onward.
I also dedicate this to my dear brother Dorai Thodla, who is unfortunately no longer with us. He was a serial entrepreneur, writer, mentor par excellence to many more than I can count. He was encouraging all of us (my brothers) to write about our chosen field. Some of us started, some of us didn’t. I didn’t, till now. I miss him dearly, and he would have liked this - thanks for everything Dorai.
Week 1 begins next. We start where both Marcus and Krishna start: with the question of what you actually control. Spoiler: it’s less than you think, and more than enough. Also spoiler: you will spend the rest of your career re-learning this, and that’s fine. Marcus did too.