Change Advisory Board

Tag: Stoicism

  • Stone, Soul, and Software

    Stone, Soul, and Software

    The philosophical principles underlying human conduct and ancient wisdom traditions establish a framework for understanding order and morality. Marcus Aurelius emphasized that the body is perishable, merely a “little flesh and breath” or a “network, a contexture of nerves, veins, and arteries”, while the rational soul should seek to know itself and choose its own nature. The end for rational animals is to follow reason, be content with destiny, and understand that the Universe is transformation. This pursuit of wisdom is paralleled in Freemasonry, which holds that all elevating and benign religions share fundamental truths. Masonry, founded on Geometry, or the fifth science, utilizes symbols like the Rough Ashlar, representing the unpolished mind awaiting cultivation through liberal education, and the pillars Boaz and Jachin, which denote strength and stability.

    Ancient texts, particularly the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible, have shaped modern language and literature. The KJV has contributed more to English than perhaps any other literary source, providing phrases like “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41) and introducing words like helpmate, derived from “help meet for him” in Genesis. Its influence is evident across English literature in works by Shakespeare, John Milton (Paradise Lost), Herman Melville (Moby-Dick), and C.S. Lewis. The original KJV included the Old Testament, New Testament, and the Apocrypha, though the Apocrypha was later removed in the 1800s by scholars concerned about contradictions and whether the books were divinely inspired. The KJV is textually connected to the Textus Receptus, and resources like the King James Bible Dictionary exist to clarify its content, covering topics such as Strong’s Numbers.

    In modern technology, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) embodies a structured approach to maintaining complex systems, focusing on reliability as the “most fundamental feature of any product”. SRE, which originated from asking a software engineer to design an operations team, caps operational work (toil)—defined as manual, repetitive work that scales linearly—at 50% of an engineer’s time to ensure focus on engineering projects. Core SRE principles include managing service risk using error budgets, employing automation to maximize consistency and reduce costs, and utilizing distributed consensus algorithms like Paxos and Chubby to manage critical state reliably across failures. Monitoring is essential, prioritizing actionable alerts (immediate human intervention) and classifying outputs clearly (Alerts, Tickets, Logging). These practices, particularly preparedness, postmortem analysis, and automation, align with fundamental lessons learned across other high-reliability industries, such as the nuclear navy, defense, and aviation.

    Source #01: Site Reliability Engineering edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy

    Source #02: Contribution of the King James Bible to the English Language – International Journal of Applied Research

  • Compassion and The Compass

    Compassion and The Compass

    This episode walks straight into the messy, human middle ground between loving people and losing yourself in the process. Using the story of Paul and Eunice—a sober helper and a deeply traumatized veteran—we unpack what compassion really looks like when trauma, addiction, resentment, and financial collapse all live under the same roof.

    Guided by the compass of Freemasonry and the inner fortress of Stoic philosophy, we explore the idea of the cable tow as a moral boundary: the point beyond which “helping” turns into self-destruction. We connect that to how we run systems and services under stress—incidents, outages, RTOs, RPOs, blameless postmortems—and show that both people and platforms need the same thing: clear limits, honest observation, and recovery plans that actually work.

    This isn’t an abstract seminar. It’s trauma, rent, sobriety, hatred, love, and the quiet power of one small, consistent life lived decently in front of another broken person.

    In this episode, we explore:

    • How trauma reshapes a worldview—and why one honest counter-example can start to crack it

    • Why “compassion does not require self-immolation,” and what healthy boundaries really look like

    • How Marcus Aurelius would diagnose over-giving, resentment, and walking away “without hatred”

    • The parallels between personal recovery and organizational recovery: incidents, DR tests, and blameless postmortems

    • Practical steps for people who feel like Paul (the overwhelmed helper) or Eunice (the traumatized survivor) today

    This is an episode about keeping your heart open and your compass steady.

    Source #01: Paul and Eunice is a personal story from real people in my personal life. Names have been changed to protect the identities of the individuals.

  • The Temple and the Error Budget

    The Temple and the Error Budget

    What happens when you put Solomon’s Temple next to a modern error budget and ask them both what “perfection” really means? In this episode, we explore the idea that reliable service is not just a technical outcome but a moral consequence — the visible result of character, duty, and brotherly love expressed through IT work.

    Drawing on Freemasonry, Stoic philosophy, and the writings of Marcus Aurelius, we unpack what it means to work logarithmically toward an ideal you will never fully reach. We contrast the Masonic Temple and its working tools with SRE and ITIL principles: why 100% uptime is the wrong target, how continual improvement mirrors lifelong moral refinement, and how duty becomes the backbone of both spiritual life and professional reliability.

    Then we zoom in on the real builders of today’s “Temple”: the backup and recovery specialist guarding the sacred data; the infrastructure engineer hewing and setting the foundation; the Citrix/WebSphere/DB2 specialist adorning the inward workings; the mainframe programmer quietly automating away chaos; and the mainframe operator keeping vigil in the sanctum of production. By the end, your ticket queue, your runbooks, and your change windows look less like random toil and more like stonework on a shared, enduring structure.

    Source #1: ITILv4 Foundation

    Source #2: The Meditations by Marcus Aurellius