Legacy Systems

I love the podcast Accidental Creative. It’s a great quick audio inspiration for creative professionals looking to produce good work without getting burned out.

The latest podcast covers legacy systems, and how to keep them from inhibiting our work. A few take-a-ways:

• At regular intervals, step back and examine how you're doing your work. 
• Examine if your priorities are still the same, or if they have shifted.
• Do you need to approach work differently to stay effective?
• Changing tools can help, but don’t assume it’s an end-all solution.

In many ways the podcast’s portrayal of legacy systems reflects the traditional eLearning course and LMS relationship. At what point do we take a step back and reexamine if what we’re doing is truly effective? Are we just throwing good money after bad?

This was a timely topic for me. I’m becoming increasingly frustrated with the tools available for creating eLearning content. Often, I find myself developing hand-coded solutions that work in spite of the tool rather than in tandem.

The landscape of web technology is changing faster than tool vendors can release products and patches. I often wonder why I’m even using certain tools in the first place, and if I should just hand-code my own solutions entirely.

So for me, taking a step back means reflecting on whether it’s finally time to give my hand-coding skills some much needed attention and work to someday ditch such expensive legacy systems entirely.