Maintainable

Robby has a chat with Urban Hafner, a Senior Software Developer at Risk Methods. The episode starts off on a high note with Urban explaining that maintainable software is all about time being spent on looking after one’s code base. While it doesn’t guarantee that a code base will be perfect all the time, Urban insists that it makes things better than when an engineer just develops new features and leaves everything else the same. That ends up causing huge messes that are an uphill task to clean up. From his years of experience, he also shares how team attrition negatively affects the maintainability of a code base, the challenges that startups face when the original agency and/or developers depart from their software projects, the importance of measuring your progress on maintenance work to keep the momentum up, and a lot more of his wealth of engineering wisdom. The experience he had going from a software engineer to an engineering manager, only to realize that he wasn't a good manager, and then navigating back into an individual contributor role will make for a very interesting story. So don’t miss out. See you on the inside!Book Recommendations:Teixcalaan Series by Arkady MartineHelpful LinksUrban on TwitterExpanding Beyond PodcastSubscribe 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 VP of Engineering at ConvertKit, Amy Isikoff Newell. Amy starts off by talking about why perfection is the enemy of software development. There’s no engineer who likes admitting that there are messy bits in their code. They think the messy bits shouldn’t be there, but that's not possible. Amy feels that when it comes to the maintainability of software, it shouldn’t drive an engineer to drink. For her, well-maintained software should be about delivering great value to users with minimal pain points.She ends up talking about a lot of skills that are excellent for software engineers as well as managers. She also shares her expertise on career path options for engineers between being an individual contributor and transitioning into management, how managers can reduce drag on their engineering teams by applying a human-focused approach to their management, how technical debt can impact both the recruitment and retention of software engineers, and so much more.Book Recommendations:Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well By Douglas Stone & Sheila HeenHelpful LinksAmy on TwitterAmy on LinkedInAmy’s NewsletterAmy’s WebsiteConvertKit is HIRINGSubscribe 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 was invited to join a panel of several hosts from podcasts at RailsConf 2022 in Portland, Oregon. In their conversation, they discuss podcasting, engaging with our listeners, the state of the Ruby and Rails communities, we also dug into some topics related to maintaining open source projects, opening doors for juniors into our industry and into open source, among other topics.This episode will be cross-posted across several of our podcasts.Hosted by Jemma Issroff, Brittany Martin, Robby Russell, Chris Oliver, Jason Charnes, Andrew Culver, Andrew Mason, Nicholas Schwaderer, and Colleen Schnettler.Podcasts InvolvedThe Ruby on Rails PodcastMaintainable Software PodcastFramework FriendsRemote RubySoftware SocialJoin the discussion in the Maintainable Discord CommunitySubscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts. 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 Chelsea Troy, the Staff Software Engineer on machine learning and backend systems at Mozilla. Chelsea also maintains the Zooniverse Citizens Science mobile app, the NASA landslide data processing pipeline, and a few other open-source projects. She is a maintainer for the rock programming language and mentors formerly incarcerated technologists through Emergent Works. She teaches Python and mobile development at the University of Chicago’s Master's program in Computer Science, hosts workshops for O’Reilly, and writes at ChelseaTroy.com  For Chelsea, one of the most important characteristics of well-maintained software is a conscious effort to ensure that enough context remains available for engineers who come in without existing familiarity with the system to gain that context and maintain it. She shares more of her valuable insights on how we can go about making software more maintainable and explains why she’s not a proponent of the term “Technical debt”. She also talks about some of the strategies she uses to quantify maintenance work, how engineers can document their code with more helpful error messages that provide more context, and how to discuss the removal of features to reduce long-term maintenance load with a product team. To learn more, including what you should do when you join a new team with existing software, stay tuned. Book Recommendations:Cork Dork by Bianca BoskerHelpful LinksChelsea on TwitterChelsea’s WebsiteA Rubric for Evaluating Team Members’ Contributions to a Maintainable Code BaseQuantifying Technical DebtReducing Technical DebtSubscribe 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 Paula Paul, a distinguished engineer with Greyshore Associates, where she helps organizations adopt cloud-native technology and serves the community as an ABI Syster, diversity speaker, and mentor. Paula entered the workforce in the early ‘80s as a software engineer with IBM , where she shipped her first product on magnetic tape. She’s had roles in product development, engineering management, consulting, and she’s led several modernization efforts along the way.Paula will highlight readability and unit testing as the two most important characteristics of maintainable software, and dive into what legacy code really is, how technical debt has changed over the years, and how the industry underestimates the emotional and mental cost of context-switching. From her many years in the game, Paula will also talk about her long experience of software modernization and share her expertise on why engineers should pay enough attention to cleaning their code as they go, how organizations have to grapple with different challenges due to ineffective technical decision making processes, finding the right balance of automated testing, and so much more.For those of you who are trying to figure out what direction to head in where your engineering careers are concerned, Paula will share her wisdom in what it’s like to work in the consulting space versus a product-oriented organization. It’s going to be one very resourceful episode so don’t miss out.Book Recommendations:The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrauHelpful LinksThe Greyshore WebsitePaula on LinkedInPaula on MediumPaula on TwitterCrucial ConversationsThe Practice of Adaptive LeadershipSubscribe 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 Ben Halpern, the creator of Dev.to and a Co-Founder of Forem, a platform that Dev.to is based on. Ben shares from his experience, that well-maintained software needs to have a clear purpose and context that’s available as one is reading it and within the documentation as needed while also being flexible for future evolution. When it comes to dealing with the common challenge of naming variables and functions when we write, Ben says a glossary is fundamentally important.He then introduces us to Dev.to, shares the story of how they opted to open source the underlying platform, and what they needed to be ready to share it with the public. He also talks about how that open source software evolved out of Dev.to and became a core aspect of their financial success. Ben advises engineers to avoid overcorrecting each time they start up a new software project. And for those of us who may be considering open-sourcing our software, Ben will enlighten us on the things we should consider beforehand (In particular, security). Tune in to our conversation for that and more!Book Recommendations:Creative Quest by QuestloveHelpful LinksBen’s TwitterBen on GitHubBen on Dev.toForem WebsiteForem on GitHubDev.to CommunityAlso…follow Robby on Dev.to!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 candid conversation with Avdi Grimm, a software developer, consultant, coach, speaker, and author of the books, “Confident Ruby” and “Exceptional Ruby” He is also the creator and head gardener of Graceful.Dev. Avdi’s opinion on well-maintained software is that it’s more about teams than code and the fact that more attention need to be paid on documentation. He emphasizes the value of useful commit messages and conveying the why over the how. He also shares examples of executable documentation. Robby and Avdi dive into what technical debt looks like for different teams and how it can either be taken as a serious course of action or just as a term for areas of friction in a codebase. Avdi shares his experience in organizing technical debt-type tasks and highlights the importance of teams being able to articulate and quantify friction. As organizations continue to adopt the DevOps mindset, there is lingering debate as to whether it is more of a philosophy or a role. Avdi believes that DevOps is less a role and a philosophy, an approach to lifecycle management and how teams are organized around that outlook. Stay tuned to sample more of what Avdi had to share in this resourceful 44-minute episode.Book Recommendations:The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret WorldResources Mentioned:The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford Team Topologies - by Matthew Skelton and Manuel PaisThe Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'  by Sidney DekkerConfident Ruby By Avdi GrimmExceptional Ruby By Avdi Grimm Helpful LinksAvdi’s LinkedInAvdi’s TwitterAvdi on GitHubAvdi on YouTubeGraceful.DevSubscribe 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 Aran Khanna, the Co-Founder, and CEO of Archera, a company that helps organizations find cloud solutions that fit their companies. Aran starts off by sharing that great functional decomposition, brevity, and simple but high coverage tests are, from his experience, the three common characteristics of well-maintained software. He then shares his wisdom on the importance of brevity in code and documentation, when and where copy/paste is appropriate, and how to get a better handle on your costs of cloud resources to better predict future utilization and pricing.He also shares what problems Archera.ai solves for its customers and how Archera captures, estimates, and prioritizes its own technical debt. Stay tuned for more on that and to get Aran’s advice on how to propose investing time into paying down technical debt. As an added bonus, you can go to https://archera.ai/?modalId=request-demo-podcast to get a free demo of Archera’s services.Book Recommendations:Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity by Frank Slootman The Mythical Man-Month by Fred BrooksHelpful LinksAran’s LinkedInAran’s TwitterAran’s WebsiteArcheraSubscribe 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 Jerod Santo, the Managing Editor and Partner of Changelog Media. Jerod helps lead and co-host Changelog’s flagship podcast, The Changelog, and builds all the cool stuff that makes Changelog awesome. Jerod shares his journey from being a typical networking engineer (Infosec) to the experienced programmer that he is today and his programming wisdom from the trenches.Tune in as he highlights the undeniable importance of automated test suites and code readability, describes the arc of an engineer’s career, and talks about the past experiences that make him lean more towards clarity over cleverness when coding. He also shares some of the things engineers should consider in regard to pulling in third-party code or writing from scratch, and so much more. Enjoy!Helpful LinksJerod’s LinkedInJerod’s TwitterChangelog MediaChangelog PodcastsRobby's appearance on ChangelogSubscribe 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 speaks with the Founder and CEO of Solo.io, Idit Levine about scenarios where rewrites are appropriate so that you can pivot your technology startup, why cleaning up technical debt early-and-often is vital, and fostering collaboration within your open source community.Additionally, Idit introduces us to tools such as Istio for managing your Service Mesh.Helpful LinksIdit's TwitterIdit's LinkedInSolo.io and on twitterIdit's GithubIdit's Book Recommendation: The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben HorowitzSubscribe 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.