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.

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 developing new ones, Alberto's Event Storming helps teams visualize every little wheel of complex machinery they are tasked to maintain or create. When you finish listening to the episode, make sure to visit Alberto's website and to check out his nearly finished book.

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 in development automation, about the ways of transforming your development team into a symmathesy. When you finish listening to the episode, make sure to take a listen of Jessica's own podcasts Greater than Code and Arrested DevOps, and to read her blog at http://jessitron.com. 

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 Grove in the 1980s, offers a fresh look at hypnosis and links all of this to coding and software development. When you finish listening to the episode, make sure to visit Mike's website www.unconsciousagile.com for more resources on unconscious behavior and hypnosis. 

Simply knowing what is in your software is not any guarantee of safety. We need to know what that software does versus what we expect it to do. We need to know its rules of behavior. 

Today, we talk with Andrew Hendela, a founder of Karambit.ai, a company dedicated to automatically detecting malware and securing your software supply chain. Andrew worked for over a decade automating hard cybersecurity problems. He has many years of experience in cybersecurity leadership and deep technical expertise in fields such as malware analysis and automated cyber attribution. He tells us about software bills of behavior and why SBOMs are insufficient to protect your software supply chain from attacks. 

When you finish listening to the episode, connect with Andrew on LinkedIn and visit Karambit.ai website. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Andrew on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-hendela/

Karambit.ai at https://karambit.ai 

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 front-end development, discusses good practices, opens for us his toolbox and explains how all of this fits into the legacy code maintenance and upgrading. And as an extra, you'll hear how nomadic lifestyle and coding go together! 

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 code and direction to notable open-source projects such as NetBSD, pkgsrc, ikiwiki, and qmail. When you finish listening to this episode, you should check out Amitai's micropodcast "Agile in 3 Minutes", his articles on legacy code and other topics, and last, but not least, you should relax with his piano performance of Medtner at the International Rachmaninoff Conference.

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 bring change to large enterprises confident in their established ways. 

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 a system and explains how to structure any software around its fundamental building blocks in order to achieve its durability. 

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 collaborators' concerns, to creating a kinder programming language and the code itself - Coraline shares her thoughts with us on the whys and hows of kindness in software industry. When you are done with the episode, make sure to visit Coraline's web-site.

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 with us the justifications for the acquisition and strategies for prudent repayment of these diverse kinds of technical debt. When you are done with the episode, you can check out Tim's blog post that steered our conversation.

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 -- people, processes, and data -- he explains why understanding people takes precedence over the two other components if a project is to succeed. When you finish listening to this episode, check out Alok's video blog which gives many insights to managers on how they should think about technology in their organizations.

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 serves as a director of the Agile Alliance Experience Report Initiative and as a president of the Wirfs-Brock Associates consulting firm. When you are done with this episode, make sure to visit Rebecca's blog where you will learn much more about design heuristics.

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. When you are done with the episode, and if you want to hear more about the user-focused software design, make sure to watch Edaqa's class on Skillshare.

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 philosophy, his workflow and his favorite tools of the trade.

In the age of rising AI, we cannot neglect the topic of the social and political consequences of the code we leave behind. Today, we talk with Amy Newell, a 24-year veteran of the tech industry and an avid activist in issues spanning from local politics to tech. Amy discusses how to engage with emerging technologies, how to use them, and how to create them while being cognisant of the harm we can inadvertently cause along the way. When you finish listening to the episode, visit Amy's website at amynewell.com and check out their newsletter at amywriteswords.com. 

Mentioned in this episode

Amy's website at www.amynewell.com

Amy's newsletter at www.amywriteswords.com

Amy on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amynewell/

Marcus Blankenship is a technical leadership author, coach and speaker, helping great programmers and coders to become great tech leaders of the future. He is the author of the book "Habits That Ruin Your Technical Team: Pitfalls and Solutions for Technical Managers". Marcus tells us what technical leadership is and how technical-experts-turn-leaders can fight their impulses to resolve problems themselves and start empowering their teams to resolve them instead. After you finish with the episode, check out Marcus's web site at https://marcusblankenship.com/ where you will find plethora of resources and workshops.

Johanna Rothman is a "pragmatic manager" and longtime leader in the software development community. She has written over a dozen books on various aspects of shipping successful software applications. On this episode, Johanna shares with us how she got into working with legacy code, how long does it take for a greenfield project to become a legacy project, do the resource limitations constrain or boost creativity and what is the role of management in a creative process. When you finish listening to the episode, you can check out Johanna's website at  www.jrothman.com where you will find an amazing collection of her workshops and training tools and materials.

Esther Derby started her career as a developer who loved machines and struggled with people. Now, she's one of the world's top experts in organizational dynamics and a leading thinker on bringing agility to organizations, management and teams. Esther playfully shares with us her intimate story of personal growth from being a satisfied solo coder to a team builder and gives us all some practical tips for learning skills that might be just outside our comfort zone.

In today's episode, we chat with Lisa Crispin, Testing Advocate at Mabl, the co-author of the Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams and one of the most influential testing professionals in the industry. Join us to hear about the significance of the whole team approach, collaboration and feedback in testing, and how the cues of success through teamwork can come from even the most unexpected sources – including from the miniature donkeys!

In 2016, Taylor Jones was in a car crash that impacted his vision severely. After recovery, he has continued to code and design for the web even though he's blind. In this moving conversation, we talk with him about accessibility and how his development practices have changed. 

In this episode, we chat with Adam Tornhill. Adam is the author of Your Code as a Crime Scene as well as Software Design X-Rays: Fix Technical Debt with Behavioral Code Analysis. He's also the founder of Empear, whose flagship product, CodeScene, helps companies prioritize technical debt by identifying "hotspots" within their codebases. 

During the show we talk about: 

• How Adam's background in psychology informs his work as a software developer. 
• Different ways to measure complexity
• Using behavioral analysis and Conway's Law to help prioritize areas to work on in your code. 

We hope you enjoy! Be sure to check out https://legacycode.rocks for even more great conversations about modernizing software. 

There's no "one right way" to implement Agile. Diana Larsen believes that software is built in the context of a "more diverse and beautiful world" that meets teams where they are and helps them achieve goals that are best for them. Together, with James Shore, she developed the Agile Fluency Model; a framework that helps chart a course for the team, create alignment with management, and secure organizational support for improvement. You can learn more about the model at https://www.agilefluency.org. 

Metaphors may seem like a literary device that has no relevance in software, but nothing could be further from the truth. On today's episode, we dive deep into the world of explaining the abstract with Nat Pryce. We touch on George Lakoff, Conway's Law, Lehman's Laws, the difference between cognitive and figurative metaphors, and much, much more. If you've ever wanted to learn how to explain your work better, especially to people who don't code very much, this is one episode you won't want to miss!

On this episode, Seb Rose, co-owner at Cucumber Limited and author of several books on Cucumber, gives us a look at how Behavior-Driven Development works alongside Test-Driven Development to tame legacy code. We walk through his personal version of Dante's rings of corporate hell and discuss why we should start thinking of the relationship between Acceptance, Integration, and Unit tests as an iceberg rather than a pyramid. 

In this episode, we chat with David Kane, a noted Agilist, to explore how legacy code systems mimic biology. By the end, you may just join Andrea by proudly identifying as fungus — the invisible system that holds other systems together. Enjoy! 

Automating refactoring and code transformation is a fascinating and efficient way to eliminate technical debt. Today, we talk with Jonathan Schneider, a Co-Founder and CEO of Moderne, Inc., and a former senior Software Engineer at Netflix, where he created Netflix Rewrite - a large-scale automated refactoring tool for Java codebases. Jonathan is also the author of SRE with Java Microservices. Jonathan tells us about the advantages, challenges, and pitfalls of creating automated refactoring tools and how to use them. 

When you finish listening to the episode, connect with Jonathan through the Moderne website and grab his book. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Jonathan on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonkschneider/

Moderne, Inc. at https://www.moderne.io

SRE with Java Microservices at https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sre-with-java/9781492073918/

In the open source world, there are a ton of legacy projects. In this episode, we chat with Jerod Santo, host of The Changelog, about legacy code in the open source ecosystem. How do you maintain projects? When do you let projects die? And how can you add value quickly when you want to contribute?  

Developers spend an average of 50-80% of their day reading code. So why don't we ever work on actively honing this skill? That's the question that Zach Shaw, the Director of Engineering at Brightgrove decided to ask. On today's episode, we geek out about reading code and discover new strategies and tactics to help us do it even better.  

Ever heard of a little app called Mint.com? Poornima Vijayashanker was the founding engineer and convinced her boss that the name he picked wouldn't get the market share he was looking for. After she successfully grew Mint, she exited after it was acquired by Intuit. Poornima is the Founder of Femgineer and now mentors other developers and founders on how to build better software. In this episode, we chat with her about the importance of selling your ideas so that they can grow. You can find her on Twitter at @poornima and on Femgineer.com. 

When should you replace your software and when does it make sense to transform it? Scott Hanselman joins us to share his thoughts from several projects throughout his career, including Das Blog (the engine that runs Hanselminutes), Windows Live Writer, Tiny OS and .NET Core. 

To document or not to document? That is the question that we chat about today with Lauri Apple, who works as an Agile Coach and Open Source Evangelist with Zalando. Lauri is also an Ambassador for OpenSource.com and the creator of FeedMeReadMes. We chat about what finding documentation balance, where to find the best README templates, and the difference between corporate and open-source documentation. 

Emily Gorcenski is an expert on aerospace software based in Charlottesville, Virginia. When we first reached out to her, we wanted to discuss estimating and budgeting for government projects. Then, tragedy struck. In this episode, we dive into a deep discussion about the intersection of technology, activism and identity politics in the context of Emily's on-the-ground account of the tragic violence that happened in her hometown. 

David Bernstein, author of Beyond Legacy Code, chats with Scott and Andrea about nine development practices that can help us make it easier to work with (and even prevent) legacy code. 

What does Britain leaving the European Union mean for the software industry? On a recent trip to London, Andrea found out through an insightful conversation with Krishna Thakur (http://www.capriconsulting.co.uk/). In this episode, we'll explore how Brexit is likely to impact developers on both sides of the pond. 

Bryan Beecham (https://www.industriallogic.com/people/bryan) is an Agile consultant with over 20 years of comprehensive IT experience as well as a Human Refactoring Guide. In this episode, we discuss becoming a minimalist developer, intentionally taking time off to increase your productivity and how passion doesn't have to lead to burnout.

Edafe Onerhime (https://ekoner.com/) is a consultant on Data Science and Data Analysis who has over 20 years of experience answering difficult questions about open data. She has helped governments, charities and businesses make better decisions and build stronger relationships by understanding, using and sharing their data. In this episode, we discuss the history of open data, its importance in building communities and its similarities to open source and open science.

Imagine if you could counter ransomware by exploiting it to create a backup of your attacked data for you. Now, that would be disruptive! 

Today, we talk with Lance James. James is an experienced cybersecurity specialist with 25 years of experience in the field. Building on his programming, network security, digital forensics, malware research, and counterintelligence experience, Lance tells us how to use disruptive thinking to improve cyber security and predict and counter major cyber threats. 

When you finish listening to the episode, connect with Lance on LinkedIn.

Lance on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/unit221b/

Lance's TedTalk at https://www.ted.com/talks/lance_james_how_attackers_can_use_your_brain_against_you_in_psy_ops

In this special episode recorded at the AATC 2017, Andrea Goulet speaks with Martin D. Lund, a scrum-certified software engineer who helps run an engineering team and a parent to three children on the autism spectrum. Founder of Agile for Autism (http://www.agile4autism.com/), a nonprofit initiative to help parents build educational and therapeutic programs for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, Marty shares tips for working with someone on the autism spectrum and how he successfully implemented agile practices in his parenting.

In this special episode, returning guest, speaker and Agile technical coach Llewellyn Falco co-hosts with Corgibytes' Chief Code Whisperer M. Scott Ford. They recap the talks they attended and cover topics such as pitching talks, the value of meetups and practice, adapting talks on-the-fly, pair programming, how technical "debt" is like credit card debt and weight gain, and more.

Returning guest Woody Zuill is a veteran programmer, sought-after consultant and international speaker, as well as credited with both the "no estimates" and the "mob programming" movements. In this episode, we discuss estimates, working on a problem versus working on a symptom, paradigm shifts, and much more!