lambdathoughts

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."

If it is personal, where do you host?

Thank you - that makes a lot of sense.

SEEKING WORK - Ventura County, CA or Remote

Seasoned C#/ASP.Net developer with tons of experience (full stack) looking for full-time/contract or remote work. Tech Stack: C# (4.0)/ASP.NET (WebForms/MVC), SQL Server 2008, Agile, Javascript, jQuery, Bootstrap and a little bit of PHP. Contact via email in profile.

I briefly had a painful bout back in 2000 - was working full-time and was taking classes too. Luckily, had a good physiotherapist and went for ultrasound. The nerve damage was minimal, and the following helped: 1. Get some rubber squeeze balls - they have different strengths (indicated by color). Remind yourself to use them every 30 minutes 2. You can substitute the above with Chinese medic(Baoding balls). They are extremely effective 3. DO some hand stretch exercises (yoga helps here). A basic exercise is twining your forearms around each other and stretching them gently. 4. Keyboard setup - make sure that your fingers are positioned as in playing the piano - that is, they should not raise the wrist but lower the wrist to the keys. 5. Give regular rest to your hands - go free of mouse/keyboard.

These worked/are working for me - YMMV - I luckily avoided having surgery (not fun)