All posts tagged: legacy systems

You can not control your legacy because your legacy does not come into being until you are no longer in the society.

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Legacy is how we view the past. All history is legacy. What you know about your favourite author, footballer, musician, or poet is their current legacy. But legacy changes over time.

For example, Thomas Midgley Jr. was thought to be an inventive genius. He developed a method to make high compression internal combustion engines stop knocking, making the modern automobile possible. He then went on to invent a way to replace the noxious, flammable gasses used in refrigeration, making the systems much safer. The Society of Chemical Industry awarded Midgley the Perkin Medal in 1937. In 1941, the American Chemical Society gave Midgley its highest award, the Priestley Medal. This was followed by the Willard Gibbs Award in 1942. He also held two honorary degrees and was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences. In 1944, he was elected president and chairman of the American Chemical Society. When he died, later that year, he was considered one of the greatest inventors of all time.

Fast forward to today and it is now said of him that “Midgley had a more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history”, and that he possessed “an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny”. Midgley was also seen as a “one-man environmental disaster”. How did he fall so far so fast? Midgley was the man who invented leaded gasoline and freon.

Midgley’s legacy, though not as he had hoped, is probably now secure, or at least as secure as it can be. At some point people will forget that Midgley ever existed. Leaded gasoline has never been seen by today’s younger drivers, and freon has been banned for several decades.

It is impossible to secure a legacy. At some point all great works are lost to the sands of time and all names as well. Legacies fade. Midgley is not as well known as he was in the 1940s or 1970s; eventually he will fade away. I am fairly certain that the guy who designed the great pyramids was well known in his day and celebrated in death, and probably spoken about for many years thereafter. He had a legacy, but today we know nothing about him.

As a software engineer, legacy is the old stuff. Legacy software is the old code that keeps the world spinning; without it, your bank probably wouldn’t work. Software developers tend to want to work on the new shiny stuff, but as soon as they finish the code and it goes out into the world it is legacy. It is, for better or worse, their legacy. They have no control over how the legacy is viewed. Nobody has control over their legacy, because legacy is what people in the present think of you in the past.

Everything is legacy. The new shiny stuff is just future legacy. I find it interesting that it becomes legacy at a specific instant in time. I think that this is true for all legacies. I believe that upon death, or withdrawal from society, a person’s legacy comes into being.

In Buddhism there is the concept of three types of lives:

• * life with no beginning and no end – eternal life
• * life with a beginning and an end – mortal life.
• * Life with a beginning and no end – the life of a teacher.

Your legacy survives as long as someone remembers you or your teachings. Your core values will outlast your name and may outlast your genetics as an identifiable person. Your actions, teachings, and values will be twisted and molded to fit the particular circumstances of those that remember you.

Your legacy is not your creation, it is the creation of those that come after. Your legacy cannot be corrupted, it simply is or is not. And eventually it will fade into the background noise of history.