Frameworks come and go. I’ve loved and abandoned more of them than I can count on both hands — jQuery felt permanent once, and so did a few others I won’t name and embarrass myself with. The one habit that’s survived every single stack change in nine years of building software is embarrassingly low-tech: a few minutes with my Bible before I open my laptop.
It started at Babcock, half out of obligation, half out of genuine curiosity. It’s stayed because I noticed, somewhere around year three of actually doing it consistently, that the days I skip it don’t feel dramatically worse — they just feel thinner. Less grounded. More reactive to whatever Slack message or client fire shows up first.
What this isn’t
It’s not a productivity system. I’m not going to tell you it makes your code better, because I don’t think it does, directly. It’s not a networking strategy dressed up in faith language, even though I know writing about it publicly could look that way. I’m writing about it because it’s true and because “passion for the gospel” isn’t a phrase I want to just claim — I’d rather show the unglamorous, daily, easy-to-skip version of what that actually looks like.
What it’s given me, concretely
Perspective, mostly. When a client relationship goes sideways, when Hustlrs has a rough week, when a production incident eats a Saturday I’d planned to spend with my wife — starting the day reading something older and steadier than my to-do list has a way of resizing the crisis back down to its actual size. Most of what feels urgent at 9am isn’t, and I need reminding of that more often than I’d like to admit.
Nine years in
I’ve built for fintech, healthcare, education, Web3, social platforms — CTO roles, founder roles, freelance chaos in between. The stack changes every year. The order of operations for my mornings hasn’t, and honestly, I think that’s the more interesting through-line of this whole career, even if it’s the one line item that’ll never make it onto a resume.
Coffee. Bible. Then, finally, Stack Overflow.