Legacy Code Rocks

In the open source world, there are a ton of legacy projects. In this episode, we chat with Jerod Santo, host of The Changelog, about legacy code in the open source ecosystem. How do you maintain projects? When do you let projects die? And how can you add value quickly when you want to contribute?

Developers spend an average of 50-80% of their day reading code. So why don't we ever work on actively honing this skill? That's the question that Zach Shaw, the Director of Engineering at Brightgrove decided to ask. On today's episode, we geek out about reading code and discover new strategies and tactics to help us do it even better.

Ever heard of a little app called Mint.com? Poornima Vijayashanker was the founding engineer and convinced her boss that the name he picked wouldn't get the market share he was looking for. After she successfully grew Mint, she exited after it was acquired by Intuit. Poornima is the Founder of Femgineer and now mentors other developers and founders on how to build better software. In this episode, we chat with her about the importance of selling your ideas so that they can grow. You can find her on Twitter at @poornima and on Femgineer.com.

When should you replace your software and when does it make sense to transform it? Scott Hanselman joins us to share his thoughts from several projects throughout his career, including Das Blog (the engine that runs Hanselminutes), Windows Live Writer, Tiny OS and .NET Core.

To document or not to document? That is the question that we chat about today with Lauri Apple, who works as an Agile Coach and Open Source Evangelist with Zalando. Lauri is also an Ambassador for OpenSource.com and the creator of FeedMeReadMes. We chat about what finding documentation balance, where to find the best README templates, and the difference between corporate and open-source documentation.

Emily Gorcenski is an expert on aerospace software based in Charlottesville, Virginia. When we first reached out to her, we wanted to discuss estimating and budgeting for government projects. Then, tragedy struck. In this episode, we dive into a deep discussion about the intersection of technology, activism and identity politics in the context of Emily's on-the-ground account of the tragic violence that happened in her hometown.

David Bernstein, author of Beyond Legacy Code, chats with Scott and Andrea about nine development practices that can help us make it easier to work with (and even prevent) legacy code.

What does Britain leaving the European Union mean for the software industry? On a recent trip to London, Andrea found out through an insightful conversation with Krishna Thakur (http://www.capriconsulting.co.uk/). In this episode, we'll explore how Brexit is likely to impact developers on both sides of the pond.

Bryan Beecham (https://www.industriallogic.com/people/bryan) is an Agile consultant with over 20 years of comprehensive IT experience as well as a Human Refactoring Guide. In this episode, we discuss becoming a minimalist developer, intentionally taking time off to increase your productivity and how passion doesn't have to lead to burnout.

Edafe Onerhime (https://ekoner.com/) is a consultant on Data Science and Data Analysis who has over 20 years of experience answering difficult questions about open data. She has helped governments, charities and businesses make better decisions and build stronger relationships by understanding, using and sharing their data. In this episode, we discuss the history of open data, its importance in building communities and its similarities to open source and open science.