Christopher Wren (1632-1723)
Filed under the name Christopher · September 27, 2026
Christopher Wren had to rebuild a huge chunk of London after the Great Fire of 1666, which is essentially the biggest infrastructure disaster-recovery project of his era, and instead of throwing something up quick and functional, he designed St. Paul's Cathedral and dozens of churches that are still standing landmarks centuries later. As someone who works in backend engineering, I have a lot of respect for people who get handed an emergency and use it as an opportunity to actually build something better and more durable than what was there before, instead of just patching the immediate problem. That's a genuinely rare instinct, in a crisis, to think in centuries instead of just in weeks. London's skyline still carries his decisions in it, which is a wild kind of uptime for anything a human being designs. My code from three years ago barely still runs. Wren's stuff has been load-bearing for over 350 years.