Denis Rechkunov: When Consistency Becomes a Culture

Maintaining consistency across a sprawling codebase is one of the hardest challenges in software engineering. Denis Rechkunov, a Principal Software Engineer at Elastic, joins Robby to share how his team turned consistency into a cultural practice rather than a technical checklist. From managing open source projects with hundreds of contributors to experimenting safely with new patterns, Denis believes maintainability begins with shared ownership, not just clean code. He explains how Elastic introduced automation and linters to improve cohesion without discouraging creativity. Instead of enforcing perfection across the entire system, Denis’ team scopes their changes to manageable areas and rewards steady progress over sweeping rewrites. Their annual “On Week” tradition gives engineers space to fix what frustrates them most, showing how small, focused bursts of work can produce big leaps in stability and morale. The conversation also explores the human side of maintainability. Denis recalls early lessons about unclear expectations, the importance of documenting decisions in public pull requests, and how open feedback loops build trust across remote teams. Whether it’s stabilizing a flaky CI pipeline or mentoring new engineers, Denis argues that technical excellence thrives when consistency becomes a habit shared by everyone.Episode Highlights [00:01:02] Defining Well-Maintained Software Denis identifies consistency, documentation, testability, and agility as the key ingredients of maintainable systems. [00:02:22] Balancing Standards and Autonomy How automation and linters help preserve code cohesion while minimizing interpersonal friction. [00:04:08] Experimenting Safely Elastic scopes new patterns to low-risk modules before broader adoption, avoiding mass rewrites. [00:07:19] Incremental Cleanup Linters only apply to changed files, helping the team fix issues gradually without overwhelming contributors. [00:08:02] Maintainability as a People Problem Denis highlights that sustainable systems depend more on culture and mentorship than on architecture. [00:10:13] Lessons from Miscommunication An early experience showed the cost of undocumented conventions and unclear onboarding. [00:17:09] Making Space for Technical Debt Elastic’s engineers dedicate part of each sprint and an annual “On Week” to tackle maintenance work. [00:23:05] Restoring CI Reliability Denis shares how the team revived a pipeline with only a 10% success rate by categorizing failures and focusing on data. [00:32:00] Practicing Software Archaeology He stresses the value of documenting discussions in pull requests to avoid historical guesswork later. [00:36:09] Feedback and Trust Open communication, humility, and mutual feedback loops form the backbone of a maintainable culture. [00:51:00] Embracing Chaos in Open Source Denis encourages teams to accept a degree of entropy and focus their efforts on user-facing stability. [01:00:00] Security and Privacy Why maintainability, trust, and privacy are inseparable pillars of long-term sustainability. [01:01:06] Where to Start Instead of rewriting code, start by cultivating maintainability as a shared value across the team.Resources MentionedElasticgolangci-lintAppSignalThe Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov — Denis’ recommendation inspired Robby to finally pick up a copy and start reading it himself.Denis’s Blog – rdner.deDenis on GitHubDenis on MastodonDenis on LinkedInThanks to Our Sponsor! Turn hours of debugging into just minutes! AppSignal is a performance monitoring and error-tracking tool designed for Ruby, Elixir, Python, Node.js, Javascript, and other frameworks. It offers six powerful features with one simple interface, providing developers with real-time insights into the performance and health of web applications. Keep your coding cool and error-free, one line at a time!  Use the code maintainable to get a 10% discount for your first year. Check them out! Subscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsSpotify Or search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts. Keep up to date with the Maintainable Podcast by joining the newsletter.