I am writing a weekly series applying Stoic philosophy and the Bhagavad Gita to software development — first 5 weeks are free

After 20+ years in the industry, I kept noticing that the hardest problems in my career were never technical. They were about attention, ego, desire, burnout, meaning, and how to keep doing good work when everything around you is chaotic.

Two ancient frameworks kept helping me: Marcus Aurelius's Meditations (Stoic philosophy) and the Bhagavad Gita (Indian philosophy of action and duty). They converge more than you'd expect — both were written by people under pressure, making high-stakes decisions, trying to act with integrity when outcomes were out of their control.

So I am writing a weekly series that applies both to the daily reality of software development: production incidents, code reviews, technical debt, team burnout, career plateaus, imposter syndrome, context switching, organizational politics, and the quiet 2 AM question of whether any of this matters.

It's called Meditations in Code. The writing style is direct, specific, and occasionally funny (there are jokes about Kubernetes, Docker, and people who schedule 30-minute meetings to ask one question).

The first 5 weeks + a bonus article on context switching are free: [https://swanandkriyaban.substack.com/p/welcome-to-meditations-in-code]

Happy to hear what resonates or what doesn't. The series will be written as a practice, not a product — but I figured it might be useful to others.