Legacy Code Rocks

To build anew or to rebuild? Many developers have a knee-jerk reaction to start building existing software systems from scratch because they think that is the easiest way forward.  Today, we talk with John Ousterhout . John is the Bosack Lerner Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. His current research focuses on new software stack layers to allow data center applications to take a...

Working on legacy code is never easy, but some programming languages make it more enjoyable.  Today, we talk with Richard Feldman , the creator of the Roc programming language , the author of Elm in Action , and the creator of the Frontend Masters courses Introduction to Elm and Introduction to Rust . Richard tells us about the advantages of the Elm, Rock, and Rust languages and why they are more...

Product teams are scared of technical debt and refactoring. They press on to make something new, not to question what they have already created. However, the urgency to deliver new products carries the risk of technical debt.  Today, we talk with Andreas Creten , a software engineer turned CTO. Andreas is a co-founder of Made With Love , a company that helps startups and scaleups to get out of tec...

How can cooking help you have a better team? Today, we talk with Kimberly Fox . Kimberly leads virtual and in-person cooking classes and is a recipe developer and writer for her blog, From Market to Table . Building on more than ten years of experience working in STEM and witnessing gender inequalities and micro-cultures in corporate settings, Kimberly developed her signature corporate cooking exp...

In this episode, we are talking with Michael Kennedy , Python expert and the founder and host of two podcasts - Talk Python To Me and Python Bytes . He also runs Talk Python Training which provides online courses for Python developers. Michael tells us about the reception of Python version changes and the most challenging aspects of the transition to ARM processors.  When you finish listening to t...

Software security has become one of the most important topics affecting the lives of millions of people.  Today we talk with Rob Dickinson , a co-founder, and CTO of Resurface Labs , a data-driven API security solution. He tells us how can security be woven into the culture of a software team, how to build more secure software, and how to adapt traditional security tools to the challenges of cloud...

We design software within a particular context. When that context changes, so should the software. But change is often difficult.  Today we talk with João Rosa , an independent consultant focused on helping organizations to make strategic decisions when building software. João is one of the authors of Software Architecture Metrics , the curator of the book Visual Collaboration Tools , and the host...

If you try to fix broken things in JavaScript, you will probably break the Internet because the entire Internet expects those "mistakes" to be there. Today we talk with David Neal , a family man, geek, musician, illustrator, international speaker, software developer, and Microsoft MVP . David shares the quirkiest things he loves to hate in JavaScript and tells us about the most challenging aspects...

Legacy becomes legacy only when the memory of how the system works is gone. This is where observability kicks in.  Today we talk with Hunter Madison. Hunter is the cloud architect for Instana , an observability platform for IBM. He has a decade of software development experience covering everything from e-commerce to database development. He tells us about the significance of observability for mai...

The world as we know it wouldn't exist without open-source software. We have learned to rely and depend on these free products that magically get maintained and updated by communities of volunteers. In our over commercialized world, the very plausibility of projects like Linux, Android, and Apache might seem incomprehensible to some. And yet, they make the world go round.  Today we talk with Naomi...

Agile has become the mainstream in software engineering, and agile principles should feel natural to legacy code menders.  Today we talk with Michael Toppa , the Senior Engineering manager at FastRuby.io . Michael has been a developer, product owner, and engineering director for over 25 years. He had worked for many organizations, including E-TRADE , Ask.com , the University of Pennsylvania, ActBl...

Imagine if you could refactor legacy code with a single CLI command? Well, you can, at least if you are working with PHP.  Today we talk with Matthias Noback , a long-time web developer and the author of several programming books, including Rector - The Power of Automated Refactoring , which he co-wrote with Tomáš Votruba. Matthias tells us how to use Rector in your daily workflow, how it automate...

There is a lot of buzz around Kotlin , a new Java-based programming language that many think might eventually replace Java. But is all this talk justified, and are the predictions of replacement realistic?  Today we talk with Duncan McGregor and Nat Pryce , the authors of Java to Kotlin . They reveal to us all the advantages of Kotlin, why and when you would want to transition to it from Java, and...

We all want our code to be stable and resilient to future challenges. But we need to strike the right balance between testing our systems and the cost of failure. This is much harder to achieve than it sounds.  Today we talk with Melanie Frank , Managing Vice-President of Cyber Engineering at Capital One . Her teams innovate boldly to secure the enterprise while obsessing over excellence. Before C...

We all strive to write an ideal code - easily readable, functional, and clean. We use many tools to achieve this. However, we often forget why we need our code to be tidy.  Today we are talking with Samuel Taggart , President of GDevCon N.A . and the owner of SAS Workshops . Sam is a natural teacher, and he enjoys sharing what he learned with others. We talk with Sam about the tools and methods th...

Imagine if you could compare concepts side-by-side between a programming language you know and one you don't. Well, now you can! Today we talk with Sarah Withee, a polyglot software engineer, international tech speaker, and robot tinkerer. Sarah is also the author of Code Thesaurus, the polyglot developer reference tool. She tells us about the reasons behind the creation of the thesaurus, its cont...

Coders spend most of their time reading rather than writing code. Yet, when you look at the undergraduate programs, boot camps, and conferences, everything seems to be dedicated to code production.  Today we talk with Felienne Hermans . Felienne is an associate professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science at Leiden University and the author of the book The Programmer's Brain . Sh...

Some of the biggest risks for cyber security frameworks come from employees meant to maintain them. The reason for that is simple, and it couldn't be more human - people who don't feel well don't perform well.  Today we talk with Nyota Gordon , the founder, developer, and all-around do-gooder at Transition365 , a cyber resiliency firm that helps cybersecurity professionals increase their leadershi...

Agile is all about the speed of iteration and execution. One of the things that often gets neglected is the business impact of the code we are shipping. Today we talk with Prabhjot Singh, serial entrepreneur and the president and CEO of Pyze. He tells us how taking time to better understand the system we are mending can speed up our work and yield much better results.  When you finish listening to...

We frequently discuss compassion, empathy, and kindness on this podcast. What we rarely focus on, however, is being kind and compassionate to ourselves.   Today we talk with Clare Sudbery. Clare is a lead engineer at Made Tech, and she is the host of the Making Tech Better podcast. Clare tells why it is so important to be compassionate to ourselves and shares with us some techniques on how to achi...

Everyone wants their software system to be resilient - to continue carrying out its mission-critical tasks in the face of disruption or adversity. But resiliency has its cost, and not just in a material sense. With resiliency, your system becomes more complex and harder to maintain. That is why we always have to balance our resiliency requirement with other non-functional requirements around the s...

We all get excited about that new, shiny code, but more often than not, our company can live without it. On the other hand, some old and boring lines of code laying around are usually the backbone of our entire business system. And while inventors tend to get all the praise, those who keep the wheels running smoothly are content with, well, the wheels running smoothly.  Today we talk with Tramaine...

Making widespread changes to a codebase can be hard! Your team starts a long-lived branch that is difficult to maintain and often impossible to merge; you and your team-mates agree to improve the code slowly over time, but you all forget this agreement, and the improvement never happens. But what if there were a tool that keeps you on track to steadily improve your code without making you feel lik...

Kubernetes with James Sturtevant As applications grow to span multiple containers deployed across multiple servers, operating them becomes more complex. While it is possible to maintain these growing applications manually, most will reach out to an orchestrator to help them with the tasks. As applications grow to span multiple containers deployed across multiple servers, operating them becomes mor...

The power of software is enormous, but the code can only be as good as the humans who write it. Despite popular belief, "being good" has nothing to do with character predisposition. It is a product of an intentional effort to nurture care and compassion.  Today we talk with Liz Acosta , a software engineer and a developer advocate at Stacklet . Liz's past professions as a copywriter, social media...