Philosophy

You know the file I mean. That one. The one everyone sidesteps in meetings, with names like legacy_utils.php or v2_hackfix_backup_FINAL_v5_REAL.php. The one that’s always “outside scope,” “due for a rewrite,” or, my favorite, “stable, so let’s not touch it.” Funny thing is, it’s not the code that scares us. It’s the echoes. Open it, and you don’t just see functions, you see fingerprints. A quiet panic commit from 2016. A block of commented-out code labeled “don’t delete (trust me).” A TODO that’s basically a cry for help. ...

I used to think systems thinking was just for software. Dependency graphs, input/output, feedback loops, all that neat mental architecture we use to design clean, resilient code. But lately, I’ve started seeing it everywhere. In how I raise my kids. In how I boil pasta. In how I manage mornings without losing my mind. Take bedtime with my son. Some nights it’s smooth. Other nights it’s a slow collapse of logic: hunger, then bouncing, then tears, then bottle refusal. I used to react, fix each piece as it broke. Now, I step back. What changed upstream? Was he overstimulated? Did we skip the quiet time buffer? Systems thinking teaches me: don’t debug the failure, debug the flow. ...