Legacy Code Rocks

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.