Robby has a chat with Stefanni Brasil, the Co-founder and Educator at hexdevs, Co-creator of the Get to Senior online course and community, and most recently joined thoughtbot as a developer. Reflecting on her experience in the industry, Stefanni says that well-maintained software can only be a result of teams agreeing on conventions before coding starts. She feels that the term technical debt facilitates better communication and her perspective around it has shifted over time due to the fact th...
Oct 17, 2022•41 min•Ep. 133
Robby has a chat with Andrea Goulet, the CEO of Corgibytes, a software development shop dedicated to maintaining and modernizing software applications. Named by LinkedIn as one of the top ten professionals in software under 35, Andrea is the host of the podcast Legacy Code Rocks, is the author of the forthcoming book, “Empathy-Driven Software Development” , has co-founded several successful technology companies, and has taught over 50,000 students how to turn soft skills like empathy and communi...
Oct 10, 2022•55 min•Ep. 132
Robby has a chat with Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, John Ousterhout. John founded Electric Cloud with John Graham-Cumming. Ousterhout was a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley where he created the Tcl scripting language and the Tk platform-independent widget toolkit and proposed the idea of co-scheduling. Ousterhout led the research group that designed the experimental Sprite operating system and the first log-structured file system. Ou...
Sep 19, 2022•49 min•Ep. 131
Robby has a chat with Courtney Wilburn (She/Her/Hers), the Sr. Engineering Manager at Elastic Cloud, the leading platform for search-powered solutions. She is an experienced DevOps Engineer, speaker, and writer. With solutions in enterprise search, observability, and security, Elastic helps enhance customer and employee search experiences, keep mission-critical applications running smoothly, and protect against cyber threats. For Courtney, well-maintained software is all about software having a ...
Sep 12, 2022•48 min•Ep. 130
Robby has a chat with Nelida Velazquez, a Senior Software Engineer at Cobalt Labs, a company that modernizes traditional pentesting through their Pentest as a Service (PtaaS) platform. By combining a SaaS platform with an exclusive community of testers, they deliver the real-time insights teams need to remediate risk quickly and innovate securely. Nelida highlights documentation, testing, and consistency as the three things that are critical to ensuring that software is maintainable. She feels t...
Sep 05, 2022•38 min•Ep. 129
Robby has a chat with Casey Watts!, the Founder at Happy and Effective and the author of Debugging Your Brain. Their conversation begins with Casey calling out engineers who go about the maintainability of their software by just cleaning stuff up instinctually instead of having a deliberately prioritized engineering backlog. He talks about the importance of team leaders giving engineers leeway to choose when to explore and try things, and even take some free time. That enables the engineers to f...
Aug 08, 2022•45 min•Ep. 128
Robby has a chat with Marc Cornellà, the official maintainer and major contributor for the Oh My Zsh project. Marc will start off by sharing his wisdom on the characteristics of well-maintained proprietary software. He will also tell us whether the same characteristics apply when it comes to open-source software. Marc started contributing to open-source projects back in 2011 when he worked on a university project that generated schedules for new students. In 2015, he transitioned to Oh My Zsh, w...
Aug 01, 2022•30 min•Ep. 127
Robby has a chat with the CEO and Co-Founder of CodeSee, Shanea Leven. The conversation starts with Shanea’s insights on the relatively unknown shift left movement which, from her own hands-on experience, has been a very great way for engineers to write maintainable and resilient code. The shift left movement emphasizes on moving, understanding, and visualizing code while moving everything closer to development when one is writing their code instead of waiting until things are in production. Tha...
Jul 04, 2022•43 min•Ep. 126
Robby has a chat with Greg Foster, the Co-founder and CTO of Graphite, an open-source CLI and code review dashboard built for engineers who want to write and review smaller pull requests, stay unblocked, and ship faster. Based on his tons of infrastructure engineering, he highlights getting modules and interfaces right as one of the ways to create clean maintainable software. They cover a variety of topics including a technical introduction to Graphite’s tooling, the challenges that come with SO...
Jun 27, 2022•45 min•Ep. 125
Robby has a chat with Urban Hafner, a Senior Software Developer at Risk Methods. The episode starts off on a high note with Urban explaining that maintainable software is all about time being spent on looking after one’s code base. While it doesn’t guarantee that a code base will be perfect all the time, Urban insists that it makes things better than when an engineer just develops new features and leaves everything else the same. That ends up causing huge messes that are an uphill task to clean ...
Jun 13, 2022•39 min•Ep. 124
Robby has a chat with the VP of Engineering at ConvertKit, Amy Isikoff Newell. Amy starts off by talking about why perfection is the enemy of software development. There’s no engineer who likes admitting that there are messy bits in their code. They think the messy bits shouldn’t be there, but that's not possible. Amy feels that when it comes to the maintainability of software, it shouldn’t drive an engineer to drink. For her, well-maintained software should be about delivering great value to us...
May 30, 2022•40 min•Ep. 123
Robby was invited to join a panel of several hosts from podcasts at RailsConf 2022 in Portland, Oregon. In their conversation, they discuss podcasting, engaging with our listeners, the state of the Ruby and Rails communities, we also dug into some topics related to maintaining open source projects, opening doors for juniors into our industry and into open source, among other topics. This episode will be cross-posted across several of our podcasts. Hosted by Jemma Issroff , Brittany Martin , Robb...
May 27, 2022•42 min•Ep. 122
Robby has a chat with Chelsea Troy, the Staff Software Engineer on machine learning and backend systems at Mozilla. Chelsea also maintains the Zooniverse Citizens Science mobile app, the NASA landslide data processing pipeline, and a few other open-source projects. She is a maintainer for the rock programming language and mentors formerly incarcerated technologists through Emergent Works. She teaches Python and mobile development at the University of Chicago’s Master's program in Computer Scienc...
May 16, 2022•52 min•Ep. 121
Robby has a chat with Paula Paul, a distinguished engineer with Greyshore Associates, where she helps organizations adopt cloud-native technology and serves the community as an ABI Syster, diversity speaker, and mentor. Paula entered the workforce in the early ‘80s as a software engineer with IBM , where she shipped her first product on magnetic tape. She’s had roles in product development, engineering management, consulting, and she’s led several modernization efforts along the way. Paula will ...
Apr 25, 2022•45 min•Ep. 120
Robby has a chat with Ben Halpern, the creator of Dev.to and a Co-Founder of Forem, a platform that Dev.to is based on. Ben shares from his experience, that well-maintained software needs to have a clear purpose and context that’s available as one is reading it and within the documentation as needed while also being flexible for future evolution. When it comes to dealing with the common challenge of naming variables and functions when we write, Ben says a glossary is fundamentally important. He ...
Apr 18, 2022•48 min•Ep. 119
Robby has a candid conversation with Avdi Grimm, a software developer, consultant, coach, speaker, and author of the books, “Confident Ruby” and “Exceptional Ruby” He is also the creator and head gardener of Graceful.Dev . Avdi’s opinion on well-maintained software is that it’s more about teams than code and the fact that more attention need to be paid on documentation. He emphasizes the value of useful commit messages and conveying the why over the how. He also shares examples of executable doc...
Apr 11, 2022•44 min•Ep. 118
Robby has a chat with Aran Khanna, the Co-Founder, and CEO of Archera, a company that helps organizations find cloud solutions that fit their companies. Aran starts off by sharing that great functional decomposition, brevity, and simple but high coverage tests are, from his experience, the three common characteristics of well-maintained software. He then shares his wisdom on the importance of brevity in code and documentation, when and where copy/paste is appropriate, and how to get a better han...
Apr 04, 2022•44 min•Ep. 117
Robby has a chat with Jerod Santo, the Managing Editor and Partner of Changelog Media. Jerod helps lead and co-host Changelog’s flagship podcast, The Changelog, and builds all the cool stuff that makes Changelog awesome. Jerod shares his journey from being a typical networking engineer (Infosec) to the experienced programmer that he is today and his programming wisdom from the trenches. Tune in as he highlights the undeniable importance of automated test suites and code readability, describes th...
Mar 28, 2022•54 min•Ep. 116
Robby speaks with the Founder and CEO of Solo.io , Idit Levine about scenarios where rewrites are appropriate so that you can pivot your technology startup, why cleaning up technical debt early-and-often is vital, and fostering collaboration within your open source community. Additionally, Idit introduces us to tools such as Istio for managing your Service Mesh. Helpful Links Idit's Twitter Idit's LinkedIn Solo.io and on twitter Idit's Github Idit's Book Recommendation: The Hard Thing About Hard...
Mar 21, 2022•43 min•Ep. 115
Robby speaks with Emily Giurleo, Senior Software Developer and co-founder/organizaer of WNB.rb. In this episode, Emily shares the importance of software communicating its purpose, the differences between maintaining open source versus propritary software projects, and community building. Additionally, they discuss Emily's experience of being a paid maintainer of MongoDB's Ruby client library, the importance of useful CHANGELOGs, debugging tips for Rubygems, when to and/or not to use mocks. Helpf...
Feb 07, 2022•48 min•Ep. 114
Robby speaks with Jean Yang, Founder and CEO of Akita Software. In this episode, Jean discusses why software needs to be more honest with itself, recruitment tactics at small startups, and why we should be careful before doing what the big organizations are doing, what developer influences advocate versus what real developers do day-to-day. Helpful Links Jean's Twitter Jean's LinkedIn Akita Software Akita on Twitter Book Recommendation: Sick in the Head by Judd Apatow Subscribe to Maintainable o...
Dec 13, 2021•49 min•Ep. 113
Robby speaks with Shaundai Person, Senior Software Engineer at Netflix and creator of TypeScript for JavaScript devs. Shaundai brought a treasure trove of insights, starting from her fascinating transition from sales to tech, straight into the heart of what makes code maintainable. She's a fan of making things simpler (think Legos, not knitted castles), and her take on the modular build of software components is something every developer should hear. Did you know that your past experiences, no m...
Nov 29, 2021•51 min•Ep. 112
Robby speaks with Chris Birchall, author of Re-Engineering Legacy Software and Lead Software Developer at 47 Degrees. They cover how to identify both dead and zombie code in your software, approaches to consciously taking on technical debt, and when rewrites might be appropriate. Helpful Links 47 Degrees Re-Engineering Legacy Software Follow Chris on Twitter Book Recommendation: Sherlock Holmes Series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Subscribe to Maintainable on: Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Or sear...
Nov 22, 2021•40 min•Ep. 111
Robby speaks with Swizec Teller, Senior Software Engineer at Tia and author of Serverless for Frontend Engineers . In this conversation, Swizec shares his thoughts on how startups need to learn how to leverage technical debt effectively, an introduction to his book, and the traits of a Senior Engineer Mindset . Helpful Links Swizec on Twitter Swizec on LinkedIn Serverless for Frontend Engineers The Senior Mindset Series Tia Blog post: How to rewrite your app while growing to a $100,000,000 serie...
Nov 08, 2021•42 min•Ep. 110
In this episode of Maintainable, Robby Russell chats with Heidi Waterhouse, Transformation Advocate at LaunchDarkly and contributor to " Docs for Developers ." Heidi shares her insights on the crucial role documentation plays in software maintenance, how to manage documentation debt, and why "the best diff is a red diff." Episode Highlights [00:00:53] Heidi's Take on Maintainable Software : Discussing the characteristics of well-maintained software, with a focus on modularity and context-aware d...
Nov 01, 2021•47 min•Ep. 109
Robby speaks with David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH), Creator of Ruby on Rails and CTO of Basecamp / HEY. Disclaimer : Robby sat down with DHH in early March 2021 about ~5-6 weeks before Basecamp's policy changes were announced and the significant impact that had within our community. It's quite likely that some of Basecamp's internal software engineering processes have since changed. In an enthralling episode of Maintainable, host Robby is joined by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the original ...
Oct 04, 2021•53 min•Ep. 108
Robby speaks with Matt Wynne, who is currently a co-lead of Cucumber Open and a BDD Advocate at SmartBear. They cover an introduction to Cucumber and how it fits into a software team's toolbox, the importance of reliable tests and speedy tests for quick feedback loops, and why teams struggle to introduce TDD into existing software applications. Helpful Links Cucumber Smartbear Gherkin Technical Debt vs Technical Waste Follow Matt on Twitter Matt's blog Book Recommendation: Zen and the Art of Mot...
Aug 02, 2021•41 min•Ep. 107
Robby speaks with Tom Granot, Solution Engineer at Lightrun. They discuss producing content for technical (and non-technical) audiences, why consistency in your communication style matters, and the importance of good bug reporting and resolution. Helpful Links: [Book Recommendation] The Hacker's Diet by John Walker Follow Tom on Twitter Tom's website Lightrun Monica CRM Async http client Subscribe to Maintainable on: Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Or search "Maintainable" wherever you stream yo...
Jul 19, 2021•46 min•Ep. 106
Robby speaks with Andrew Watkins, VP of Engineering at Buildops. They dig into what it means to be "easily testable", the downsides to being allured by new technology, and why rewrites are really, really tough. Helpful Links Connect with Andrew on LinkedIn Follow Buildops on LinkedIn [Book Recommendation] Heroes Die Subscribe to Maintainable on: Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Or search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts. Join the discussion in the Maintainable Discord Community Su...
Jun 28, 2021•47 min•Ep. 105
Robby speaks with Rodney Cobb, Principal DevOps Engineer at Remine Inc. They discuss the three verticals of maintainable systems, the importance of mental health days, why all work needs to be visible and tracked, comparing DevOps to Hip Hop culture, and taking time to ask yourself, "when do I take the time to level up?" Helpful Links Rodney on LinkedIn Book Recommendation: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B Cialdini PhD Subscribe to Maintainable on: Apple Podcasts Overcast Spot...
Jun 21, 2021•45 min•Ep. 104
