In the world of computer programming, "Legacy Code" is the stuff nightmares are made of. It’s the old, messy, undocumented programming sitting at the core of a system. It’s often full of bugs, it crashes constantly, but nobody wants to touch it because they are terrified the whole thing will break. We all run on legacy code. We usually call it "family history," but it’s the same thing: a set of default settings hardcoded into us by the people who came before us. My source code has some critical bugs. My father left when I was young. That event didn't just leave an emotional gap; it installed a corrupted operating system for handling stress. I inherited a default setting for obesity, for hiding from conflict, and for using food to numb out difficult emotions. For 40 years, I let that buggy code run in the background. I executed the same loops : get stressed, eat to soothe, isolate, repeat. Hardware vs. Software We used to think our DNA was like a Read-Only file—t...
Nearly twenty years ago, I started a blog called The Path is Too Deep, a geeky reference to a rare computer error message. A great deal of life has happened since then, a life I would like to share. So, here again, are some random bits of unfiltered Chris.