Maintainable

Adriana Villela - On Being a Serial Refactorer

Aug 22, 2023

51:24

Robby has a chat with Adriana Villela, a Senior Developer Advocate at Lightstep. Adriana highlights that well-maintained software should be software that one can understand when they go into the code even if they’re not super familiar with it. She shares why she values being a serial refactorer and describes what beautiful code should look like. Adriana views debuggers as her best friends because as she says, “I do find maintaining documentation very difficult. That’s where a debugger comes in very handy so that he can step through the code to figure out what is going on”

She will share a story about joining a software project that required a lot of refactoring, why asking for forgiveness is often easier than asking for permission, her involvement with the OpenTelemetry project and the standardization of observability protocols, and how to think about observability on a practical day-to-day level as a software engineer. She will also introduce us to Lightstep and what being a Senior Developer Advocate role is like, and dive into trace-based testing, why every software engineer should develop a trace mindset, the complexities of tooling we have today versus what was available a few decades ago, and what her podcast, On-Call Me Maybe Podcast, is all about. Stay tuned for all that and more.