Discussion--What is your legacy?
What will you leave for those who come after you? These are questions most
of us ponder at some point in life. Whether we choose to define it as the
money we accumulate or the deeds we do or the people we influence, it is
rather tied with how we view the meaning of life.
When defining projects, business people often talk of a triangle--time,
cost, and quality. As the saying goes, pick any two. You can have it fast
and cheap, but the quality will suffer; you can have it fast and high
quality, but it will be very expensive; you can have it cheap and high
quality, but it will take a long time; etc.
In life, there is a similar triangle--astound, serve, and provoke. Is
your goal in life to perform great deeds and astound like Albert Einstein,
serve others like Mother Teresa, or to be provocative like Groucho Marx or
Howard Stern? Undoubtedly, we all desire some element of each in different
proportions, and most favor one over the others. That makeup defines the
nature of our legacy and what we strive to accomplish in our lives.
From the trite to the technological, legacy is used in
information technology to describe applications, languages, platforms, and
techniques inherited from earlier technology. It is frequently a challenge
to keep these legacy applications running while converting to newer, more
efficient ones. Furthermore, doing so is often imperative when the older
proprietary applications and devices are no longer compatible with current
ones.
