Maintainable
Do you feel like you're hitting a wall with your existing software projects? Are you curious to hear how other people are navigating this? You're not alone. On the Maintainable Software Podcast, Robby speaks with seasoned practitioners who have overcome the technical and cultural problems often associated with software development. Our guests will share stories in each episode and outline tangible, real-world approaches to software challenges. In turn, you'll uncover new ways of thinking about how to improve your software project's maintainability.
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Software isn’t always about rapid iteration. Sometimes, the real challenge lies in carefully assessing the existing environment. Chris Salvato, a Senior Staff Engineer at Shopify, believes that spending time in the “problem space” is vital for any long-lived application. Rather than diving immediately into controllers
Heimir Thor Sverrisson joins Robby to discuss the importance of software architecture in long-term maintainability. With over four decades in the industry, Heimir has witnessed firsthand how poor architectural decisions can set teams up for failure. He shares his experiences mentoring engineers, tackling technical debt
Not every messy piece of code needs a refactor. Noémi Ványi, Senior Software Engineer at Xata, joins Robby to discuss how to develop the intuition to know when refactoring is truly necessary and when it’s just unnecessary churn. She shares her approach to balancing pragmatism and maintainability, how product teams and
How much can legacy code tell us beyond just functionality? Julia López, Senior Software Engineer at Harvest, believes that even small details—such as white spaces, variable names, and formatting choices—can reveal a system’s history. In this episode, Julia and Robby discuss the importance of refactoring and how a stro
Episode Overview Marty Haught joins Robby to discuss the sustainability of open-source projects, the challenges of maintaining RubyGems, and why the metaphor of technical debt may not fully capture how software ages. Instead, he suggests thinking of it as drift—the natural misalignment of software with its evolving pur
Mike Bowers, Chief Architect at FairCom, has spent decades navigating the evolution of database technology. In this conversation, he and Robby explore the challenges of maintaining a 40+ year-old codebase, balancing legacy constraints with forward-thinking design, and the realities of technical debt. Mike shares how Fa
