Legacy Code Rocks – Détails, épisodes et analyse

There are three groups of people around every legacy system - those who are stuck with it, those who don't want to be with it, and those who love it and see its value. How do we reconcile these three opinions and rewrite legacy code without completely replacing it?

Today we talk with Dave Thomas. Dave is an all-around player in the software industry with vast experience as an executive, investor, board member, consultant, architect, and engineer. He is Chairman of Bedarra Corp, which provides consulting on technology and business strategy for emerging technology, products, and services. He tells us what the drivers of legacy innovations are, why he thinks refactoring is a "little lie" of the modern software industry, and how to approach modifications in less-than-ideal situations. 

When you finish listening to the episode, connect with Dave on LinkedIn and visit his website at www.davethomas.net. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Dave Thomas on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidathomas/ 

Dave's website at https://www.davethomas.net/index.html 

Badera Corporation at https://www.bedarra.com/ 

One of the reasons why it is difficult to work with legacy code is the lack of preserving the contextual reasons for past coding choices. 

Today we talk with Chelsea Troy, a Machine Learning Team Lead at Mozilla and a computer science lecturer at the University of Chicago. She tells us about the value of code review in the software-building process and why code review should not be treated solely as a mechanism for approval. 

When you finish listening to the episode, visit Chelsea's website at https://chelseatroy.com.

Mentioned in this episode:

Chelsea's website at https://chelseatroy.com 

Back in August 2023, HashiCorp announced that after nine years of Terraform being open source under the MPL license, they were switching it to a non-open source BSL license. This sent shockwaves through the software development community. 

Today we talk with Cory O'Daniel, a CEO and co-founder of Massdriver, a company helping improve developers' experience of cloud operations, offering self-service capabilities along with governance and guardrails to developers. Cory is also one of the drivers behind the Open TF initiative in response to Hashicorp's changing their open source licenses from MPL to BSL. He tells us why this switch matters, what to do about it, and how to keep open-source projects sustainable. 

When you finish listening to the episode, connect with Cory on LinkedIn, visit Massdriver's website, and check out the Open TF initiative.

Mentioned in this episode

Cory O'Daniel on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/coryodaniel/

Massdriver at https://www.massdriver.cloud 

Open TF at https://opentofu.org

Open TF GitHub at https://github.com/opentofu

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 in coding and how the Idea Flow helps identify and eliminate them. When you finish listening to the episode, make sure to subscribe to Arty's newsletter at http://arty.twilightcircuit.io. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Arty on Twitter: https://twitter.com/janellekz?lang=en

Janelle Arty Starr, Idea Flow: How to Measure the PAIN in Software Development, at https://leanpub.com/ideaflow 

Arty's newsletter: https://arty.twilightcircuit.io 

Greater than Code podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/greater-than-code/id1163023878

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 of her talks. 

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 the episode, make sure to visit Emily's blog Coding Is Like Cooking. 

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 engineering at Macromedia and Adobe. When you finish listening to the episode, make sure to visit the Better Allies website and Twitter handle, check out Karen's website and take a look at her other book: Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking. 

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 measuring "dependency freshness." It just might change your life!

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.

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.