Kill It with Fire

We struggle to modernize legacy systems because we fail to pay the proper attention and respect to the real challenge of legacy systems: the context has been lost. We have forgotten the web of compromises that created the final design and are blind to the years of modifications that increased its complexity. We don’t realize that at least a few design choices were bad choices and that it was only through good luck the system performed well for so long. We oversimplify and ultimately commit to new challenges before we discover our mistakes.