I didn't expect Star Wars to make me a better software engineer.
But somehow, Anakin Skywalker did.
Not because I wanted to become like him.
Actually, quite the opposite.
Anakin taught me lessons about engineering, leadership, trust, independence, and what happens when you let other people make decisions for you.
And then Darth Vader taught me another lesson:
Nobody is coming to save you. Get up and do something.
That doesn't mean you should trust nobody.
It means you shouldn't blindly assume that someone else will fix your problem.
That distinction has stayed with me.
Anakin was the engineer who could make things work
Anakin's defining characteristic was capability.
He could look at machines and understand them instinctively. As a child, he built C-3PO from spare parts. He modified his pod. He could fly things other people couldn't.
He was constantly put into situations where the conventional answer was essentially:
"You can't do that."
And Anakin's response was usually:
"Watch me."
I relate to that part.
Software engineering attracts a certain type of person.
You get handed the broken system.
The undocumented API.
The production incident nobody understands.
The server that hasn't been touched in three years.
The deployment that only works if you sacrifice a goat to some forgotten configuration file.
And eventually, you become the person people call when something needs to work.
You learn to figure things out.
You Google.
You read documentation.
You inspect the source code.
You experiment.
You break things in a controlled environment.
You build your own tools.
You keep going.
That ability to figure things out independently has probably been one of the most important skills I've developed.
And Anakin helped me understand why.
Don't wait around for someone to save you
This is probably the biggest lesson I took from Vader.
There were moments in Anakin's story where he desperately wanted someone else to solve an impossible problem for him.
But eventually, nobody could.
And that's something I've carried into engineering and life:
If something is important to me, I can't sit around waiting for someone else to make it happen.
One of the clearest examples of this came from my time leading engineering and IT at a school.
I wasn't working with a giant engineering organization where every problem had a dedicated specialist. We had software, infrastructure, networking, devices, users, vendors, and day-to-day operational problems all competing for attention.
At the same time, we were building an ERP from scratch.
That meant dealing with things like student records, attendance, finance, notifications, authentication, infrastructure, and the operational systems underneath all of it.
There were plenty of moments where it would have been easy to say:
"We need someone else to handle this."
Instead, I had to figure it out.
If the infrastructure wasn't doing what we needed, I investigated it.
If a deployment was unreliable, I dug into the deployment process.
If the network wasn't giving us what we needed, I investigated the topology, hardware, ISP setup, and failure points.
If the application had a problem, I went into the code.
Sometimes that meant learning something I hadn't worked with before.
Sometimes it meant building a solution myself.
Sometimes it meant asking someone who knew more than me.
But the important part was that I didn't make waiting the strategy.
That experience changed how I approach engineering.
I don't need to know the answer immediately.
I need to know how to find the answer.
That's a much more valuable skill.
Trust people, but don't outsource your thinking
That experience also taught me the other side of the Anakin lesson.
You can't blindly trust people.
Not because everyone is trying to mislead you.
Most people aren't.
But because everyone can be wrong.
A vendor can recommend something that isn't right for your environment.
An experienced engineer can make a bad architectural assumption.
Documentation can be outdated.
A manager can have incomplete information.
And an AI can confidently generate something that looks perfectly reasonable while being completely wrong.
I've learned to separate trusting someone's expertise from outsourcing my judgment to them.
If someone tells me something, I want to understand why.
If someone recommends an architecture, I want to understand the tradeoffs.
If something doesn't make sense, I want to test it.
If something is important enough to affect production, I want evidence.
That's not distrust.
That's engineering.
The infrastructure problem nobody else was going to magically solve
There was another part of that job that reinforced this mindset.
The infrastructure wasn't just a theoretical exercise.
We had real users depending on it.
We had servers, networking, storage, endpoints, printers, authentication, internet connectivity, and applications all interacting with one another.
Problems in one area could become problems somewhere else.
A network issue could look like an application issue.
An application issue could look like a server issue.
A server issue could actually be storage.
And sometimes the answer was simply that two things that were supposed to work together didn't.
The only way through that was to investigate the whole system.
I ended up working across Ubuntu and Debian servers, Azure, Docker and Kubernetes, TrueNAS storage, networking, authentication, access systems, and application infrastructure.
The result wasn't just that individual problems got fixed.
We were able to improve the environment substantially, including reaching around 99.9% uptime, reducing Azure spend by roughly 20%, reducing deployment errors by about 45%, and saving more than 15 hours of operational work each week through automation and better processes.
Those numbers matter to me less than what they represent.
They represent a mindset.
I didn't always have the perfect answer.
I didn't always have the perfect resources.
But I could investigate the problem, learn what I needed to learn, and start improving it.
That is what I mean when I say:
Get up and try.
Independence doesn't mean isolation
This is where I think the lesson gets more nuanced.
The answer isn't to become some lone-wolf engineer who trusts nobody and refuses help.
That's just another failure mode.
Good software is collaborative.
The best systems I've worked on have benefited from people challenging each other's assumptions.
Someone catches the security issue.
Someone notices the terrible database query.
Someone asks why the service needs to exist at all.
Someone says:
"Have you considered doing this differently?"
That's valuable.
Independence means you can survive without constant direction.
It doesn't mean you refuse collaboration.
I want to be the engineer who can say:
"I don't know. Let's figure it out."
Not:
"I don't know, so someone else needs to fix it."
And not:
"I know everything, so nobody else gets a say."
Technical confidence needs humility
This is where Anakin's story comes full circle for me.
Anakin had enormous ability.
But ability without humility can become dangerous.
The same is true in software.
The engineer who knows everything is dangerous.
The engineer who knows they might be wrong is much easier to work with.
I've learned to question my own assumptions.
Why does this need Kubernetes?
Why does this need another microservice?
Why are we using this database?
Why does this endpoint exist?
Why are we doing this manually?
Why does this system depend on one person?
Why am I convinced this is the right solution?
And sometimes the answer is:
"Because it's actually the right decision."
That's great.
But sometimes the answer is:
"Because this is how I've always done it."
That's when you need to stop.
Anakin's other lesson: power isn't enough
Anakin's defining characteristic was that he could do things other people couldn't.
But his story also shows the danger of believing that being powerful means being right.
That distinction matters more now than ever in software.
We have incredibly powerful tools.
Cloud infrastructure can give a single engineer enormous capabilities.
AI coding agents can write and modify large amounts of code.
Automation can replace hours of manual work.
Open-source software gives us access to systems that previously required entire teams to build.
But powerful tools don't remove the need for judgment.
They increase it.
The more powerful the tool, the more important it becomes to understand what the tool is actually doing.
I don't want to be the engineer who blindly accepts whatever an AI generates.
I want to be the engineer who can look at the output and ask:
Does this actually make sense?
That's the same principle again.
Trust.
Verify.
Understand.
Then act.
What Anakin ultimately taught me
Anakin Skywalker didn't make me want to become a better engineer by teaching me how to be powerful.
He taught me what can happen when power isn't accompanied by judgment.
Darth Vader taught me something different.
Don't sit around waiting for somebody else to fix your life.
Don't blindly trust authority.
Don't blindly trust experts.
Don't blindly trust your teammates.
And definitely don't blindly trust an AI just because it sounds confident.
Verify.
Investigate.
Learn.
Build.
Ask for help.
But keep moving.
Because sometimes the person who can change the situation is you.
And if you can't change it yet, start learning whatever you need to change it.
That's probably the biggest thing Star Wars gave me as an engineer.
Be capable enough to figure things out yourself.
Be humble enough to know you can be wrong.
Trust people, but verify what matters.
Ask for help, but don't wait for rescue.
And when the system breaks?
Get up.
Open the terminal.
Start digging.
May the Force be with your production deployments.
