In the digital world, we schedule tasks with cronjobs—automated commands that run at fixed times or intervals. Backup databases every day at 03:00. Send log summaries every Friday. Prune old files once a month. Simple, efficient, dependable—until something changes.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about carrots.
If you’ve ever built a dashboard, you know the feeling: the seductive clarity of green bars, time series graphs, and neat little boxes telling you what’s happening—right now, in real time.
It’s clean. It’s structured. It feels like control.
We’ve been taught to believe that if you log something, track it, tag it, timestamp it, you’ll understand it better.
And most of the time, that’s true.
There’s a kind of comfort in knowing something will keep working even if everything else goes sideways.
Not because you’re expecting disaster. But because, deep down, you understand how brittle most systems really are.
Start with a patch of land, dead grass, broken bricks, rusting tools in a plastic box. It might have been neglected for years. Might’ve been designed poorly to begin with. Or maybe it was never really designed at all, just left.
Now imagine turning it into a functioning system.
There’s a phrase in information security that has stuck with me: air gap.
It means a system that is physically isolated, disconnected from any network, wireless or wired. No updates. No remote access. No pings. No meaningfl attack surface (debatable, but lets stay on track). It’s what you use when the stakes are too high to risk even the faintest leak. Defence by disconnection.
There’s a saying I picked up from Gardener’s Question Time (ikr) that if something’s gone wrong in the garden, the issue’s probably underground.
There’s a moment, usually early in the morning, when the garden is still damp and quiet where I just stop and look down.
It’s not dramatic. No music swells. No monologue. Just me, standing barefoot on soil that didn’t used to be soil, staring at a space that used to be a mess of weeds, gravel, and compaction. Now it grows food. Now it holds structure.
But it didn’t get there by accident. Like anything else worth building, it runs on a stack.
Gardens don’t scale like apps. They follow rhythms: warm starts, unpredictable updates, built-in shutdowns. Everything from layout to watering schedule is shaped by the seasons, not the other way around.
We often build technology like we’re clearing land—strip it down, pave it over, install something that does one job and expects the world to adjust around it. That might make sense for servers and networks. But if we take ecology seriously, maybe it’s time to ask: What would it mean to build tech that behaves more like a forest?
