From Navy Bridges to Code Bridges
How a decade of naval engineering taught me that the best systems are the ones that survive the storm — not the ones that avoid it.
After 11 years in the Turkish Navy, I traded radar screens for terminal screens. But the lessons stayed the same.
In the Navy, you learn one thing fast: systems fail. The question is never if — it's when and how gracefully. A ship's combat management system doesn't get the luxury of "we'll fix it in the next sprint." When you're 200 nautical miles from shore, your code either works or people are in danger.
That mindset shaped everything about how I write software today.
The Watchkeeper's Mentality
On a warship, there's always someone on watch. 24/7, 365 days. You monitor systems, you anticipate failures, you have runbooks for every scenario. Sound familiar? That's essentially what modern SRE and on-call culture aspires to be.
The difference is that in the Navy, I learned this at 22 with real consequences. By the time I moved into civilian software engineering, observability and incident response felt like second nature.
Building for the Worst Case
Every system I build now starts with the same question: "What happens when this fails?"
The Transition
Leaving the Navy wasn't easy. But I realized that the skills transfer perfectly:
| Navy | Software Engineering |
|---|---|
| Mission planning | Sprint planning |
| Damage control | Incident response |
| Chain of command | Escalation paths |
| Navigation charts | Architecture diagrams |
| Drill exercises | Chaos engineering |
The uniform changed. The discipline didn't.