December 21st marked the winter solstice: the shortest day and the longest night of the year. Then as spring arrives, we reach equilibrium again. Summer follows bringing its own shift towards the longest day of the year before autumn brings it back to equilibrium. And the cycle continues.
I think we can find something profound in something as granted as the stable cycle of the seasons. Understanding cycles can be more than just poetic contemplation.
The Earth tilts on its axis, while it orbits the Sun in an endless loop. We wake, do things, sleep, repeat. And then there’s the big one. The lifecycle we only traverse once: birth, growth, maturity, death and the legacy we leave behind. Every smaller cycle orbits this ultimate arc like moons around a planet.
We recognize these patterns instinctively. A developer knows Monday is coming whether they’re ready or not, and your code follows its own rhythms too: birth, growth, maintenance and eventually deprecation.
Software doesn’t grow in straight lines any more than humans do. It pulses through the same nested cycles we inhabit, and the ones who understand this build better systems:
The daily heartbeat: Every commit triggers a build. The build spawns tests. Tests either pass or fail, and the pipeline exhales red or green. This happens dozens, hundreds of times per day in a healthy codebase. It’s automatic, unconscious—like breathing.
The weekly/biweekly rhythm: Sprints chunk time into digestible packets. Standups sync the team’s heartbeat. Retrospectives clear accumulated cruft like sleep clears metabolic waste from the brain. Miss too many retrospectives and your team starts operating like someone pulling all-nighters—functional, but increasingly erratic.
The monthly pulse: Releases go out. Metrics get reviewed. Dependencies get updated. Hotfixes patch the wounds from last month’s release. This is your codebase’s lunar cycle, regular enough to plan around but still subject to the occasional eclipse.
The yearly migration: Major versions ship. Architecture gets reevaluated. Tech debt gets tallied and scheduled for paydown (important, do not skip). This is the performance review your codebase gives itself.
The ultimate lifecycle: Every project has a birth (the MVP), a childhood (rapid feature growth), a maturity (stable releases, boring is good), eventual decline (maintenance), and finally a death or transformation (sunset, or rebirth as v2.0). The commit graph doesn’t lie and you can see the lifecycle in the frequency curve.
When you recognize that you’re in a particular phase, whether its the long night of debugging an issue in production or the birth of a new feature, you gain perspective and start working with the flows and patterns. The solstice reminds us that even the hottest day is just one point in larger pattern, the light always returns. In software, the seemingly endless refactor eventually ships. The legacy system that felt immortal finally gets retired. The junior developer becomes the senior leader.