Legacy Code Rocks

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!