I’ve been living with a strange timer hovering above my life. Five years of chemo. Multiple organ resections. Hospital cycles that slice time into medical intervals instead of seasons. For a long stretch of this PhD, I operated under the assumption that I might not be alive a year later. That kind of time compression changes what you build and why you build it.
Most people create things assuming they will be around to maintain them. I don’t have that luxury. So I started doing what I call legacy maintenance — an ongoing process of curating, indexing, and stabilizing my output, not for academic credit, not for professional polish, but for future traversal by someone or something that might exist when I don’t.
I’m Not Organizing — I’m Preparing for Archaeology
On paper, I have:
- Around 50 unfinished or semi-finished papers.
- Nearly 100 GitHub repositories, many containing deeply structured code built around my values and taste for abstraction.
- A large archive of AI conversations, technical diaries, reflections, and design notes.
- Tools — lots of them — to catalog books, annotate data, tag conversations, extract structure from my digital life.
To an outsider, that looks like digital hoarding or obsessive note-taking. But it’s not hoarding — it’s indexing against entropy.
I am building so that if someone later wants to reconstruct the shape of my thought, there are entry points — labeled doors in the labyrinth. Even if no one ever does, at least the architecture is there. I refuse to vanish into an unindexed filesystem.
Why Bother?
I ask myself this often. Why bother? Why annotate code no one may read? Why leave README files for repos that may never gain a single star? Why write metadata around conversations that might stay locked on my drives?
The only answer I have is this:
If the future is built on data, then leaving coherent, structured data behind is a moral act.
I don’t expect to be remembered. That’s ego in its weakest form. I don’t want remembrance. I want legibility. I want whatever intelligence comes after — whether machine or human — to be able to parse my work, see the pattern of how I connected ideas, and maybe inherit a small fragment of my value system.
This Is Not Nostalgia — It’s Engineering
Most people think legacy is emotional. Mine is structural. It feels more like designing a graph database than writing a memoir.
The work is not to finish everything. It’s to ensure each unfinished thing points outward — that each node has enough context for someone to follow the edge and continue. It’s about increasing discoverability in the space of possible cognitive traversals.
If I die and someone finds my archive, I want it to be a navigable lattice, not a junkyard of disconnected brilliance and decay.
Living With the Demon
Sometimes I feel possessed. A kind of manic clarity hits, and I code entire metadata pipelines or document classification tools just so future indexers — human or machine — won’t have to scrape through chaos. I know this looks obsessive. It probably is.
But obsession is just clarity under time constraint.
I am building infrastructure for a future that may never come — but if it does, I want my work to be a usable shard in the construction of something better.
That’s the core of this legacy maintenance project.
Not to be remembered.
Not to be praised.
But to leave behind artifacts that are structurally able to survive interpretation.
That’s enough.
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