Systems Thinking for Parenthood, Pasta, and PHP
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. ...