Maintainable

Robby has a chat with Andy Croll (he/him/his), the CTO at CoverageBook, a Rubyist, the Organizer of the Brighton Ruby Conference, an author, speaker, and bootstrapper. The most important thing when it comes to the maintainability of software is “That code is read much more than it’s written”, Andy says. He insists that the core focus should always be on readability. Andy will dive into the rationale for why weird things in our code should stay weird until we find a better way to express it and even shared some specific examples within a Ruby on Rails environment. He will share his career journey from the front end into the backend, what prompted him to start the First Ruby Friend project to connect newcomers to a community with people who want to be mentors, examples of how to manage technical debt in a small team and why it's okay to let some stuff "sit in the air", and so much more. Stay tuned. It’s going to be an epic one.Book Recommendations:The Overstory by Richard PowersHelpful Links:Andy's websiteOne R

Robby has a chat with Marianne Bellotti (she/her/hers), the Engineering Manager at Rebellion Defense. Marianne is the author of the books, “Hiring Engineers” and “Kill it with Fire”. She talks about the maintainability of software being about whether software can be changed and how easily changes can be made to it. She dives into her experience with legacy modernization and talks about how to effectively judge software.Marianne also shares her insights on the challenges teams face when people don't understand how older code works, the value of developing a plan around tests to naturally build confidence within an organization, why it's important to have a safe space to break things (e.g., staging/QA environments), how onboarding metrics can be difficult to compare when dealing with regulatory systems, and building empathy toward previous engineers on a project. Tune in for that and a whole lot more in this value-packed 61-minute episode.Book Recommendations:Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components t

Robby has a chat with Arpit Mohan, the Co-Founder and CTO of Appsmith, an open-source low-code tool that helps developers build dashboards and admin panels very quickly. Appsmith helps businesses build any custom internal application within hours. In regard to well-maintained software, Arpit points to the importance of engineers writing code for humans and not machines while also focusing a lot on readability. He believes useful code comments are also very crucial in facilitating well-maintained software.Arpit will share his wisdom on the importance of conveying the why over the how behind any code being developed, how open source and closed source projects have different code commenting/documentation needs, why engineers should always keep an eye out for code smells and friction in their ability to deliver software functionality, the problems that AppSmit helps organizations solve, the differences between B2C vs B2B when it comes to the benefits of automated testing, performance concerns, etc, and much much

Robby has a chat with Noah Clark, a consulting applications developer at Merchants Bonding Company, one the top 15 largest surety writers in the United States. On the top of Noah’s list of things that facilitate the maintainability of software is team dynamics. Well-maintained software can never be achieved by a single individual refactoring code or having grand ideas/visions. It’s made possible by a team coming together and committing to a practice of well-maintained software. He highlights trust and communication between a team and the company they’re developing software for as key. He also advises engineers to avoid writing code just to solve problems.Tune in as Robby and Noah discuss why engineers should ensure that their software code leans on the business domain especially when it comes to naming things, how teams can determine when it’s necessary to refactor and/or improve existing software, the complexities that come with basing software development projects on best practices, why and how to avoid blo

Robby has a chat with the Engineering Manager at Planet Argon, Ben Parisot. Ben has worked in the tech industry since 2010 and has worn many, many hats: blogger, web designer, web developer, technical producer, scrum master, technical project manager, copywriter, and more. He loves all parts of the software development lifecycle and always has a creative personal web or mobile app humming along outside of work. The first thing Ben says he looks for that represents well-maintained software is thorough and up-to-date documentation. He feels that every developer or project manager must ensure that they leave a good paper trail of the work they do. He encourages engineering teams to do regular documentation audits of internal and external documentation they use in order to find outdated and obsolete documentation. Drawing from his experience working on multiple client projects, his advice is to build processes around auditing and improving documentation to make sure it's effective. This convo will prove incredibl

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 that most projects that have employed it are the ones that have been generating revenue. Stefanni notes that software engineering teams can work seamlessly when they document their decisions (on Trello, Google Docs, etc) for future reference. Creating an environment where every team member feels safe and comfortable to speak up about any issues also contributes to project success. Steffani will also share her knowledgeable insights on how to be a good guest in another team's codebase as a consultant and the steps to take

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 communication into software skills.Through her newest venture, Heartware.dev, she is on a mission to operationalize empathy for tech teams and keynotes frequently about building a business based on balance, empathy, and trust; the perils of the technical/non-technical divide; and the technical philosophies around working with legacy code. Andrea says that the maintainability of software comes down to trust and while she doesn't find the term technical debt useful, she uses it in instances where it’s being widely used especiall

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. Ousterhout also led the team that developed the Magic VLSI computer-aided design (CAD) program.When it comes to the maintainability of software, John is more interested in the design aspects of software and feels that indeed the core goal of good software design is to make it easier to maintain software and continually improve it. He explains what problem decomposition is all about and why his course on the art of software design is probably the only one of its kind in the world. Join the convo as he also talks about how

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 good community around it that is enthusiastic about its long-term success. She shares her expertise on the traits of excellent documentation and talks about how engineers should go about joining a software team. Courtney uses the metaphor technical debt and she will graciously break down how her team discusses, prioritizes, and documents what and when they focus on it. She also talks about the challenges that come with process debt, how to go about hiring junior-level engineers, and what we can do to foster mentorship

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 that when it comes to best practices versus every individual engineers idea of software maintainability, it boils down to how a team agrees to go about things. She dives further into the basics of team agreements and talks about things an engineer should consider when they're the new person on a team, why engineers should view documentation as part of the deliverables, how to properly address technical debt, meaningful tests, and when to potentially remove tests, and so much more. Tune in on your favorite podcast player

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 feel more autonomous and have more ownership. Casey also shares strategies for managing technical debt and how teams can invest in moving faster. And on the topic of team culture, he will dig into the concept of culturesmithing and talk about the five levers that can be used to make changes happen, for example, in engineering and prioritization of backlogs. You will get to learn about the service engagements that Happy and Effective offers and gain so much more value in this candid 44-minute conversation that Robby and

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, which has been the biggest project he’s ever worked on. Oh My Zsh is a framework for Z Shell that allows engineers to install and use different themes that one can personalize according to the look and feel of their terminal. It has 200+ plugins and about 100 themes. It not only allows one to use plugins and themes from other projects, but also offers thousands of helpful functions, helpers, and so much more. The great thing about Oh My Zsh is that an engineer doesn't have to be an advanced hacker to use it. Marc will a

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. That has proven to be very helpful as codebases increase in size and complexity because it enables engineers to catch things before they write their code. Shanea talks about the importance of code visibility (Being able to visually summarize how your code is working at every step of the development process before production) and how to go about it. She shares how the code visibility movement is helping engineers overcome the challenges they face when they go into legacy codebases to try and refactor them and get them back

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 SOAs versus monolithics especially for small teams, why monorepos might be a better approach for your software team's workflow, types of metrics a team should track, and how can we, as software developers, help the product team understand the value of investing time in maintenance tasks to keep output optimal. Stay tuned for more!Book Recommendations:A Philosophy of Software Design By John OusterhoutThe Mom Test by Rob FitzpatrickHelpful LinksGreg on LinkedInGreg on TwitterGraphite WebsiteSubscribe to Maintainable on:Appl

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 up. From his years of experience, he also shares how team attrition negatively affects the maintainability of a code base, the challenges that startups face when the original agency and/or developers depart from their software projects, the importance of measuring your progress on maintenance work to keep the momentum up, and a lot more of his wealth of engineering wisdom. The experience he had going from a software engineer to an engineering manager, only to realize that he wasn't a good manager, and then navigating b

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 users with minimal pain points.She ends up talking about a lot of skills that are excellent for software engineers as well as managers. She also shares her expertise on career path options for engineers between being an individual contributor and transitioning into management, how managers can reduce drag on their engineering teams by applying a human-focused approach to their management, how technical debt can impact both the recruitment and retention of software engineers, and so much more.Book Recommendations:Thanks f

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, Robby Russell, Chris Oliver, Jason Charnes, Andrew Culver, Andrew Mason, Nicholas Schwaderer, and Colleen Schnettler.Podcasts InvolvedThe Ruby on Rails PodcastMaintainable Software PodcastFramework FriendsRemote RubySoftware SocialJoin the discussion in the Maintainable Discord CommunitySubscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts. Subscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Keep up to date w

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 Science, hosts workshops for O’Reilly, and writes at ChelseaTroy.com  For Chelsea, one of the most important characteristics of well-maintained software is a conscious effort to ensure that enough context remains available for engineers who come in without existing familiarity with the system to gain that context and maintain it. She shares more of her valuable insights on how we can go about making software more maintainable and explains why she’s not a proponent of the term “Technical debt”. She also talks about some of th

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 highlight readability and unit testing as the two most important characteristics of maintainable software, and dive into what legacy code really is, how technical debt has changed over the years, and how the industry underestimates the emotional and mental cost of context-switching. From her many years in the game, Paula will also talk about her long experience of software modernization and share her expertise on why engineers should pay enough attention to cleaning their code as they go, how organizations have to grapp

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 then introduces us to Dev.to, shares the story of how they opted to open source the underlying platform, and what they needed to be ready to share it with the public. He also talks about how that open source software evolved out of Dev.to and became a core aspect of their financial success. Ben advises engineers to avoid overcorrecting each time they start up a new software project. And for those of us who may be considering open-sourcing our software, Ben will enlighten us on the things we should consider beforehand (I