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 blog post driven development, why referring to "organizational debt" might be more effective than "technical debt", and so much more. Enjoy!Book Recommendations:The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman - https://5lovelanguages.com/I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi -  https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/Helpful Links:https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahmclark/https://twitter.com/nolarknoahSubscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Join the discussion in the Maintainable Discord Community Subscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Keep up to date with the Maintainable Podcast by joining the newsletter.

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 incredibly valuable as he shares some tips on how engineering teams can go about that based on the projects they work on and so much more. Don’t miss out!Book Recommendations:Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah HarariHelpful Linkshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/benparisot/https://www.planetargon.com/about/ben-parisotSubscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Join the discussion in the Maintainable Discord Community Subscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Keep up to date with the Maintainable Podcast by joining the newsletter.

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 when onboarding with a new client project. She will dive into her Get to Senior course and highlight all the value that it offers. Tune in for more of her software engineering wisdom.Book Recommendations:The Assertiveness Workbook: How to Express Your Ideas and Stand Up for Yourself at Work and in Relationships by Randy J. PatersonHelpful LinksFearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideashttps://twitter.com/stefannibrasilhttps://www.stefannibrasil.me/https://academy.hexdevs.com/Subscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Join the discussion in the Maintainable Discord Community Subscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Keep up to date with the Maintainable Podcast by joining the newsletter.

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 especially in software remodeling projects. From her experience, the term is not useful at all when dealing with business-minded people who view debt differently.She points out that the success of a project is always highly dependent on the project owner and the team working on their project having shared goals as they approach the writing of software. Robby and Andrea will also dive into why we should avoid deferring to other people and defaulting to being ticket takers, how empathy has different definitions, avoiding us vs them thinking, and so much more. Stay tuned and enjoy!Book Recommendations:Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself by Nedra Glover TawwabHelpful Linkshttps://twitter.com/andreagoulethttps://heartware.devhttps://corgibytes.comComing in 2023! Empathy-Driven Software Development by Andrea GouletSubscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Join the discussion in the Maintainable Discord Community Subscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Keep up to date with the Maintainable Podcast by joining the newsletter.

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 to write good code comments and why they are so important, the main differences between tactical and strategic programming, how engineers can discuss long-term improvements with their boss, how his curriculum has students approach a project with two different designs before deciding which to proceed with, and so much more. Enjoy!Book Recommendations:Talent is Overrated By Geoff Colvin Helpful LinksA Philosophy of Software Design By Professor John OusterhoutTcl/TkJohn on TwitterJohn’s WebpageSubscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Join the discussion in the Maintainable Discord Community Subscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Keep up to date with the Maintainable Podcast by joining the newsletter.

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 in our teams. It’s going to be a very interesting conversation so don’t miss out.Book Recommendations:Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds By Adrienne Maree BrownHelpful LinksCourtney on TwitterCourney’s WebsiteCourtney on LinkedInSubscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Join the discussion in the Maintainable Discord Community Subscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Keep up to date with the Maintainable Podcast by joining the newsletter.

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 and don’t hesitate to send us any of your comments and suggestions.Book Recommendations:Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-GarciaHelpful LinksA Philosophy of Software Design By John Ousterhout'sNelida's BlogNelida on TwitterNelida on LinkedInCobalt Labs WebsiteSubscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Join the discussion in the Maintainable Discord Community Subscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Keep up to date with the Maintainable Podcast by joining the newsletter.

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 Casey had. Stay tuned for more.Book Recommendations:Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaumer KnaflicHelpful LinksCulturesmithing @ RailsConf 2022 Coursera: Human-Centered Design: an IntroductionCasey on TwitterHappy and EffectiveEmpathy in TechDebugging Your BrainSubscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Join the discussion in the Maintainable Discord Community Subscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Keep up to date with the Maintainable Podcast by joining the newsletter.

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 among many other things share strategies that can be used to help organize and prioritize a popular project that has a consistent 400 to 500 open pull requests from people across the planet, and some future ideas for Oh My Zsh. You won’t wanna miss this one. Enjoy!Book Recommendations:Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. ButlerHelpful LinksMarc on TwitterMarc on GitHubOh My ZshOh My Zsh on GitHubSubscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Join the discussion in the Maintainable Discord Community Subscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Keep up to date with the Maintainable Podcast by joining the newsletter.

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 to their clients in a way that the clients can be able to maintain them. Tune in as Robby and Shanea dive into a lot more juicy topics around managing documentation, how CodeSee offers great value to engineers, tech debt, spatial reasoning, and much more.Book Recommendations:Crucial ConversationsHelpful LinksCodeseeCodesee LearnOpen Source HubBlog post discussing spatial reasoningTalk including discussion on spatial reasoning Subscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Join the discussion in the Maintainable Discord Community Subscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Keep up to date with the Maintainable Podcast by joining the newsletter.