Never Rewrite

Special Guest Aadil Farid joins us to discuss the harsh realities he confronted when he led a team that computerized ticketing on India’s Railways in the 1980s.

Special guest Brian Genisio from Khan Academy joins us to talk about their 3.5 year rewrite that successfully wrapped up this year. Learn how Brian’s team was able to achieve the nearly impossible act of successfully completing a rewrite using many of the techniques we’ve talked about in the past, plus some brand new ones! If you want to learn about what it takes to do a rewrite, buckle up!

AI tools can now write your incident retrospectives. Do developers lose by not formalizing their thoughts by writing?  In this episode Isaac and Jeffrey weigh the pros and cons of having AI write incident retrospectives and documentation.

Senior DevOps Engineer Rob Gonnella joins us to discuss the implications and risks of rewriting infrastructure. They explore the difference between rewrite and iterative delivery, scaling challenges, rewriting the data model, transitioning to a new system, and the process of rewriting a complex data model.

This episode explores an iterative refactoring workshop run by Jeffrey to improve development skills. It discusses code selection, refactoring techniques, working independently, and the benefits of the workshop.

In this episode Isaac defines impostor syndrome and ways to combat the feelings that you aren't qualified for your job.

Sometimes companies shrink instead of grow, and that impacts your work, your team, and your career. In this episode we discuss what to expect from a shrinking company.

Jeffrey identifies a strategy we employed in a previous project that helped us dramatically improve the experience of 90% of our customers without requiring a complete rewrite of an email sending engine.

Isaac discusses strategies he's used to help companies upgrade their software, and Jeffrey helps distill them into a series of steps.

In this episode Jeffrey discusses a f*ck-up of his own for this special 'F*ck-Up Friday' series - how a develop lost $1 billion (just for a little while).