I love fables. Like a picture is worth a thousand words, a simple story with a moral lesson is a good way to share experience — translating something complex into something smaller and more digestible.
Looking back across my career, I have led teams of every sort, shape, and size across a lot of different industries. The people were different. The platforms were different. The tools were constantly changing, sometimes mid-project. But when I think across every engagement, one thing runs through all of them: incremental delivery of software. That is the only constant. Not the language, not the methodology, not the org chart or the budget. Just the steady act of shipping working software piece by piece and learning from what it tells you.
I have done a lot of it. I have lived through the wins, the near-disasters, and the moments where the wheels came completely off. Every one of those experiences taught me something.
Fables strip it down to what matters. A tortoise and a hare do not need a sprint velocity chart to make a point about consistency. The simplicity is the point — it is what makes a lesson stick.
So I started writing my own.
In the tradition of Aesop, these are simple stories with straightforward lessons. None of them are made up. Every one is rooted in something real from my time working in software development. The names and characters are fictional, but the problems, the mistakes, and the breakthroughs are not.
Whether you are a seasoned practitioner looking for a way to describe something you already know, or someone newer to this work who needs a story to hold onto when things get hard — I hope you find something useful here.
