Control What You Can, Ignore What You Can’t

Part of a "Software Engineering Enchiridion"

Sep 05, 2025

This post is inspired, and continually horrified, by how organisational behaviour can literally kill.

Not just creativity, but people. This week I’ve had too many conversations with people who are barely holding it together under the onslaught of poor leadership, poor management and poor working practices.

Microsoft are not alone, sadly.

In those moments, seeing so much pain in people’s eyes, the best I can offer is something from Epictetus:

“Some things are within our control, and some are not. Within our control are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing; not within our control are our body, property, reputation, position, and, in a word, whatever is not of our own doing”

Or, more pithily:

“Control what you can, ignore what you can’t.”

It’s not much, but it can sometimes be enough…

Here’s the first essay of my enchiridion (or handbook) on software development. As the subtitle of Epictetus’s Enchiridion states, this is a":

“Handbook that is a Dagger, or a Corrector of the Skills of Human Life”.

These articles will be my very own dagger. One I offer to you. To help you navigate the human life of software development.

There will be more in the coming weeks, subscribe if it speaks to you:

“Control What You Can, Ignore What You Can’t”

Epictetus had it right. Some things are yours. Some things aren’t. The trick is knowing the difference before you lose your mind.

In our code, this is survival. You control your editor, your tests, your pull requests. You don’t always control your AI, but with the right boundaries it can at least be helpful when it’s not corrupting your codebase with a commit large enough to kill a principal developer.

You control how you treat the people you work with. You control whether your code looks like a clean kitchen after dinner or a frat house at 3 a.m.

You do not control the email that lands at 5:59 p.m. with “urgent” in the subject line. You do not control the last minute, late night request for yet another update to a slide deck because ExCo can’t run any other desktop application. You do not control the product manager who thinks adding five more features will make the release ship faster. You do not control the pager that screams at 2 a.m. because a server in Singapore decided to die.

That’s the universe. That’s chaos. That’s not your wheelhouse.

So what do you do? You write code that doesn’t fight back. You test it like the world depends on it, because sometimes it does. You design systems that take a punch without collapsing like wet cardboard. You speak clearly, review fairly, and own your mistakes without melodrama.

You write code that doesn’t fight back.

Because here’s the ugly truth: the market doesn’t care. Management doesn’t always care. The customer might not even notice. But you will. And your team will. And the late-night version of you, sitting in the dim light of a failing deploy, will absolutely care.

So, focus where your hands actually touch the work. Leave the storms of shifting priorities to blow past like bad weather. Don’t waste your sanity raging at them. Build the raft that survives the river instead.