About

The gap

The tech industry is obsessed with rigorous thinking. We have design patterns, architectural principles, testing methodologies, refactoring disciplines. TDD. SOLID. DRY. Clean Code. We will spend three hours debating whether a function should be extracted into a helper.

Then we walk into a meeting and nobody asks why we're building the thing in the first place.

We apply philosophical rigor to code and none to the decisions around code. We have patterns for software and no thinking patterns for the people who write it. Your team lead read Clean Code but never read anything about how to actually lead. Your architect can draw a system diagram but can't explain why the organization keeps making the same mistakes.

That's the gap. Not a technology gap. A thinking gap.

The method

The Techno-Socratic Method takes the oldest tool in philosophy, the question, and aims it at the technology decisions we make every day. Not the code. The decisions around the code. The assumptions that became "best practices" because nobody ever stopped to ask whether they should be.

Every article starts with something the industry takes for granted and asks whether it should be. No conclusions. No frameworks. No guru energy. Articles end in aporia, that productive discomfort when you realize your certainty was thinner than you thought.

If you want answers, there are thousands of blogs for that. If you want to think more clearly about the decisions that actually shape your work, you're in the right place.

This is a publication. It asks questions. That's it.

Written by Marco Orlandin, IT Architect.