How many pairs of eyes are needed to ensure the quality of a newly written code? When do you send your code to an impartial reviewer? Is a review always necessary? Today we talk with Pranay Suresh , a Silicon Valley startup expert, a former software engineer at Tesla, and a mentor and angel investor about code reviews. Pranay gives us a few tips on how to approach code reviews, both from the perspective of a reviewer and of a coder. When you finish listening to the episode, make sure to connect ...
May 18, 2020•33 min
Switching from a monolithic architecture to microservices has become an accelerating trend these days. Many tech leaders have already successfully transitioned, and many others are planning to follow suit. But is it always wise to abandon the monolith and adopt the services approach? And if the answer is yes, how to make the transition least painful? Today we talk with Rob Zuber , a veteran of software startups, CTO of CircleCI , and a scalability expert. Rob tells us how to choose the right arc...
May 04, 2020•55 min
Coding with empathy is one of the Corgibytes' core principles, underlying everything we talk about on this show. But not since 2016 have we taken a step back and dived deep into the subject of empathy, what it means, and how to practice it. Today we talk with Indi Young, a speaker, writer, and UX researcher dedicated to empowering makers and menders to know their problem space through empathy and deep understanding of people's purposes. Indi is an author of two books - Mental Models and Practica...
Apr 20, 2020•44 min
When repaying debt, it helps to know how big it is. The same holds for technical debt. The problem is: how do you measure it? Today we talk with Daniel Okwufulueze , a technology leader, programming polyglot, writer, and senior engineer at dunnhumby . Daniel helps us define technical debt and tells us how to quantify it without falling into usual pitfalls while doing so. When you finish listening to the episode, make sure to connect with Daniel on LinkedIn and check out his writings at Medium.co...
Apr 06, 2020•30 min
The code is predictable. Binary. It either works, or it doesn't. Working with people is much messier. Their actions and reactions are not easy to predict. Or are they? Today we talk with Claudius Mbemba , a tech leader, public speaker, and the CTO of Neu , about personality tests. How useful they are, which one to choose, is it enough to use only one, and how to use them to increase the productivity and happiness of your team. When you finish listening to the episode, visit Claudius' blog and ma...
Mar 23, 2020•38 min
To paraphrase Lewellyn Falco, when one person is programming, it is that person's best ideas that are being encoded into the software; when two people are programming together, you get the best ideas from both of them. Today we are talking with Harald Reingruber, a software engineer who specializes in visual and spatial computing, about his upcoming pair-programming tour in the US and Canada. Where is he planning to go; how will he travel; who will he pair with; and what benefits pair-programmin...
Mar 09, 2020•24 min
The easiest way to make your team members feel happy is to give them a sense of personal growth. By expanding their capacities, they exponentially increase the productivity of the team while strengthening their own sense of purpose. On today’s episode, we chat with Kwame Thomison. After a decade building software and software teams for companies like Facebook and Asana, Kwame set out as a leadership coach and founded his company, Magnetic, to help other teams build and sustain social learning cu...
Feb 24, 2020•34 min
It’s never about what you don't know. It’s the difference you can bring to the table that matters. Today we talk with A.J. Rendo , a theatre director, a philosophy major, and an enthusiast historian turned software developer. A.J. gives us a wild ride through his story — how can you switch from directing theatrical shows to maintaining legacy software responsible for managing billion dollars a day? What does such a shift do to your self-confidence? And how do you overcome self-doubt? When you fi...
Feb 10, 2020•41 min
In a modern fast-moving business environment, we are obsessed with quantitative measurements. But without qualitative data, we might get the wrong impression and incentivize bad behavior. Today we talk with Dalia Havens , Vice-President of engineering at Netlify, about selecting appropriate metrics to measure outputs of your team, increase its productivity, and, most importantly, keep it happy. Building on her experience from Netlify, GitLab, SailPoint and IBM, she shares with us how to promote ...
Jan 27, 2020•40 min
Most of the time, we focus on a specific aspect of software development and maintenance and try to see how these small pieces fit in the big picture of working with legacy code. Not today, however. Today we talk with Abraham Marín-Pérez , an extremely active Java developer with more than ten years of experience in various industries, about THE big picture and why legacy code rocks! Abraham is the author of Real World Maintainable Software and a co-author of Continuous Delivery in Java , a Java n...
Jan 13, 2020•39 min
Imagine if you could automatically follow, measure, and analyze your workflow, identify the sticking points, and remove them based on the coldblooded data. Imagine if there was such a thing as a Moneyball of coding. Today we talk with Arty Starr about the Idea Flow - a data-driven approach to measuring friction in developer's experience. Arty is the author of the Idea Flow, a panelist on the Greater Than Code podcast and a social entrepreneur. We talk about the eight most common friction points ...
Dec 29, 2019•40 min
If you want your journey to be speedy and painless, it helps to know where you are going. Today we are talking with Sabrina Leandro , the principal software engineer at Intercom and a former VP of tech at Songkick . Sabrina is a technical leader with vast experience in product development processes, systems design, and management. We talk about incremental code rewriting and how to do it most efficiently. When you finish listening to the episode, visit Sabrina's website and take a listen to one ...
Dec 16, 2019•34 min
Practice leads to perfection. Having fun while doing it can only make you wish to practice more! Today we talk with Emily Bache , a software developer and a technical agile coach at ProAgile . Emily is well known as a maintainer of an outstanding code kata Gilded Rose and as an author of several books, including The Coding Dojo Handbook and Technical Agile Coaching . Emily explains the concepts of code katas and dojos and reveals the secrets of their effectiveness. When you finish listening to t...
Dec 02, 2019•32 min
Creating an inclusive workplace culture in which all employees are thriving, the results are soaring, and the defections are non-existent is the goal of every company. One secret to creating this kind of workplace is allyship. Today we talk with Karen Catlin about everyday actions that help in building an inclusive and engaging workplace. Karen is the author of Better Allies , a leadership coach, keynote speaker, passionate advocate for inclusive workplaces and the former vice president of engin...
Nov 18, 2019•45 min
Streamlining your process increases the speed of your work while ensuring the consistent quality of your products. Today we speak with Leon Miller-Out , the CEO of a web app development and maintenance firm Singlebrook , about the top five best practices for legacy code maintenance. Listen to Leon and Scott reaching consensus in real-time, on the indispensable steps they take when dealing with legacy code. When you finish listening to the episode, checkout Singlebrook's libyear - a tool for meas...
Nov 04, 2019•37 min
To survive, every software needs to change over time. However, if the changes are too steep, the survival might quickly turn into a demise. Today we talk with our own Scott Ford , co-founder of Corgibytes and co-host of the Legacy Code Rocks, about Lehman's laws - a set of principles that explain the forces which push software systems to change and the forces that restrain that change. Hear from Scott how Lehman's laws can help you in your work and get to know Scott a little bit better....
Oct 21, 2019•45 min
Today we go back to where we started and we reprise the first ever episode of Legacy Code Rocks. Andrea and Scott discuss the idea of Makers (the developers who like to build things) and Menders (developers who like to fix things). We also define and explain the mission of this podcast. A great reminder for our old listeners and a perfect opportunity to catch-up for the new ones.
Oct 07, 2019•41 min
How can sticky notes help you and your team find and resolve problems which are deeply hidden within your business model? How can this quest through colorful papers accelerate the mending of a legacy code which supports that business model? Today we speak with Alberto Brandolini, an inventor of Event Storming , about how this fun and rapid group modeling technique can accelerate learning and productivity within your development team. From upgrading and improving the existing systems to developin...
Sep 23, 2019•32 min
Every creature, living or artificial, is learning through the interactions with its environment all the time. It is learning not only from other creatures it interacts with, but also from the context in which these interactions take place. When an environment becomes defined by such contextual mutual learning through interaction, it becomes a creature in its own right - an entity famously named by Nora Bateson as Symmathesy . Today we talk with Jessica Kerr , a developer at Atomist and an expert...
Sep 09, 2019•33 min
To successfully lead a team, we must understand why our team members do what they do. To help us unpack that, we need to dig deep into their subconscious and explore their unconscious behavior which underlines most of human actions. Today we speak with Mike Bowler , a long-time Agile technical coach and a trained hypnotist with the interest in neuroscience and psychology, about techniques that help us understand unconscious behaviors. Mike explains the clean language technique developed by David...
Aug 26, 2019•36 min
We all strive to be “full stack” developers, but many of us feel more comfortable with either back-end or front-end programming. Today we talk with Jan Jorgensen , a front-end developer who also enjoys mending legacy applications. Jan works in the Copenhagen based UX research company and is an expert in adding front-end tooling to render components in a monolithic rails app and taking advantage of modern tools instead of writing the apps from scratch. Jan breaks down the main characteristics of ...
Aug 12, 2019•36 min
What does legacy code mean to you? Is it a valuable code that is hard to change or a code you are simply afraid to change; a code that makes you money or a code you are ashamed of? In today’s episode we deep dive into the quest for the most interesting and influential definitions of legacy code with Amitai Schleier . Amitai is true renaissance man - a software development coach, legacy code wrestler, consultant , non-award-winning musician and award-winning bad poet. Amitai regularly contributes...
Jul 29, 2019•47 min
Lasting success is not measured by past achievements but by the ability to change and adapt to new developments and new demands. Nowhere does the change face more suspicion and distrust than in large enterprises with their established policies, practices and procedures, large bureaucracies, compartmentalized silos and, above all, undeniable past successes. Today we talk with Christine Chrys Sills , the Organization, Change, and Program Manager at Liatrio about DevOps transformations and how to b...
Jul 15, 2019•32 min
The mere fact that any particular legacy code is still in use is a testament of its sustainability. Today we talk with Dr. Carola Lilienthal , the CEO of the Workplace Solutions and the author of Sustainable Software Architecture about the importance of a good structure for the durability of a software. Building upon her experience dissecting more than 300 software systems of various sizes, Carola shares with us her philosophy, methodology, tools and criteria for assessing the sustainability of ...
Jun 30, 2019•32 min
The idea of a “lone genius” unleashing software marvels on the world is mostly a myth. Almost all good software is a product of the exchange of ideas, continuous discussions, and collaborations. Today we talk with Coraline Ada Ehmke - the creator of the Contributor Covenant and the laureate of the Ruby Hero Award - about the importance of kindness and empathy in coding. From creating safe spaces for discussions and exchange of ideas, through introducing empathy into understanding user needs and ...
Jun 17, 2019•43 min
Technical debt is just like a financial debt - incurring it responsibly boosts the development and growth, but failing to repay it in time can lead to bankruptcy and complete failure of the program. Today we talk with Tim Doherty , Staff Software Engineer at Procore Technologies and a co-organizer of the Santa Barbara JavaScript Meetup , about the responsible management of technical debt. Tim breaks down for us the Ward Cunningham’s definition of technical debt into sub-categories and shares wit...
Jun 03, 2019•34 min
The key to understanding real (rather than perceived) goals of any technological project is to understand the people served by that technology. Today, we talk with Alok Sharma , a founding partner of the technology project management consultancy firm Sharma Analytics . Alok gives us a deep insight into his tripartite approach to rationalizing, selecting, planning, and managing technology in small to mid-sized organizations. After discussing the three key elements of his analytical approach -- pe...
May 20, 2019•37 min
We take mental shortcuts every day in order to save our energy while achieving satisfactory results. These shortcuts, or heuristics, are in fact so mentally economical, that we are mostly not even aware of them! Yet, we use them all the time. In this episode, we talk with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock about heuristics we use in software design and why is it important to be aware of them. Rebecca is an object oriented design pioneer and an inventor of responsibility driven object design . She currently ser...
May 06, 2019•40 min
Edaqa Mortoray grew up programming. From interface design to scientific simulations, including video games and development products, he has coded a bit of everything. He is the author of the book “What is Programming?” and he runs a successful programming blog and a podcast . We talk with Edaqa about why every member of software development team should know who their user is and what their needs are. He then shares with us some good practices for defensive coding in this age of global users. Whe...
Apr 22, 2019•29 min
According to Evgeny Demchenko, technical debt and financial debt have many things in common - if used strategically, they accelerate growth, if not repaid diligently, they hinder it. Evgeny is a CTO of an O2O talent sourcing platform Top Twenty Talent and one of the organizers of the Beijing Python Meetup . He is specialized in building startups, managing complex systems and refactoring code. We talk with Evgeny about his passion for refactoring and he shares with us his technical debt philosoph...
Apr 08, 2019•37 min
