hexdevs

Listen to and watch our conversation with M. Scott Ford and learn how to build technical wealth, enjoy working with legacy code, tools, and strategies to remove dead code, and how thrive in a world of makers as a mender.

Show Notes

Are you working on Ruby on Rails Applications that are constantly on fire, overwhelmed by technical debt? What if you were building Technical Wealth instead? Learn which tools & strategies to work with legacy code effectively, remove dead code, and leave tech debt behind.

Listen to and watch our conversation with M. Scott Ford and learn how to build technical wealth, enjoy working with legacy code, tools, and strategies to remove dead code, and how thrive in a world of makers as a mender.

About our guest

M. Scott Ford is the Co-Founder & Chief Code Whisperer of Corgibytes, where he has quietly led a software maintenance revolution for the past decade. Where most people find nothing but frustration, shame, and bugs in legacy code, Scott has centered his work around his genuine love of software modernization and helping others use joy, empathy, and technical excellence to make their systems more stable, scalable, and secure.
Scott’s ideas have been featured in books such as The Innovation Delusion and as a guest lecturer at Harvard University. Scott is the author of three courses on LinkedIn Learning: Dealing With Legacy Code And Technical Debt, Code Quality, and Clean Coding Practices.
He is the host of the podcast Legacy Code Rocks and enjoys helping other menders find a sense of belonging in a world dominated by makers.

Episode Links

Chapters
00:00 intro 
01:57 makers vs menders 
03:43 menders love improving legacy codebases 
05:06 greenfield projects are glamorized 
06:30 greenfield-legacy projects 
09:07 working with legacy code: tools & strategies 
09:53 building technical wealth vs tech debt 
14:29 "the big rewrite" never works 
18:54 removing redundant code
22:56 features not used very often 
25:41 static code analysis tools 
27:23 charge extra for features used by fewer customers 
30:52 find code that is never used 
34:09 code audit with feature flags
36:07 enforce code quality with tests and CI 
39:26 measure code quality over time 
41:09 churn, complexity, and CodeClimate score 
42:43 bus factor
45:59 working with makers 
51:24 hanging out with other menders 
53:27 follow hexdevs

Creators & Guests

Host
Stefanni Brasil
I like to be around people who are kind, curious and compassionate. Co-founder of hexdevs. Developer at Thoughtbot, and a core maintainer of faker-ruby. Public speaker, writer, podcast host, Ruby developer.
Host
Thiago Araujo
Co-founder of hexdevs: helping you become an expert developer.
Guest
M. Scott Ford
Chief Code Whisperer/CTO at CorgiBytes. Finds immense joy working with Legacy Code. Pays down tech debt and fixes bugs with glee.

What is hexdevs?

We Help You Take Your Ruby Developer Career To The Next Level. Hosted by Thiago Araujo and Stefanni Brasil.