Rage Against the Dying of the Light: An Engineer’s Reflection

There’s something deeply technical in Dylan Thomas’s refrain: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” It’s not just a cry against mortality: it’s a manifesto against entropy, against the inevitable decay that every system, human or machine, must face.

In technology, we watch systems age. Code rots. Hardware wears down. Protocols that once felt immortal become obsolete in the time it takes for a new standard to emerge. The temptation is to “go gentle”, let the legacy run, let the lights fade quietly.

But Thomas’s line is the engineer’s counter-command: push back. Maintain. Refactor. Re-architect. The light is worth preserving, even if you know you cannot hold it forever.

It’s not blind resistance. The poem honors wisdom, good work, and fierce effort. For us, that might mean understanding when to let go of a tool, but never passively, always extracting what is valuable, migrating what matters, preserving the core brilliance in a new form.

The “light” is not just uptime. It’s the clarity, the functionality, the purpose that drives our craft. Rage for it. Keep it burning.