Never Rewrite

In this episode Isaac and Jeffrey discuss patterns they've seen in both highly performant and poorly-performing teams - how team culture is shaped, how overall company culture helps shape it, and why trust is one of the most important drivers of great teams.

Jeffrey introduces the concept of 'perverse incentives' for rewriting - reasons for rewriting that are pushed not for a better product or for the customer, but for the benefit of the engineer or the manager responsible for the project.

In this episode Isaac and Jeffrey invite Colleen Grafton and Nathan Keyes to talk about a shared experience of a rewrite gone wrong - and what to learn from it.

In this episode Isaac talks about his early experience understanding the importance of testing, and reflects on three distinct reasons why testing seems to be hated by developers.

In this episode, the hosts discuss the benefits of iteratively replacing code instead of doing a full rewrite. They talk about the value of making small, incremental changes and how improvements are locked in. They also emphasize the importance of solving current problems and meeting customer needs. The chapter on small continuous commits highlights the productivity and effectiveness of breaking code changes into logical pieces. Lastly, they discuss the importance of understanding code behavior and the role of documentation and testing.

In our pilot episode of “Never Rewrite”, we discuss what we mean when we tell developers to never rewrite code. Isaac reflects on what drives engineers to rewrite, and Jeffrey adds some real-world analogies involving baseball and New York stadiums.