Oliver Drotbohm, a Staff 2 Engineer at VMware, discusses the pillars of maintainable software: understandability and modifiability. They analyze the metaphor of technical debt and the importance of clear documentation in architecture design decisions. They delve into the strategic use of microservices and introduce the Modulithic project for Java Spring. Oliver gives a sneak peek of his book, 'Modulithic Applications with Spring,' and shares the challenges of writing technical literature in a constantly evolving industry.