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 and 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.
Building Technical Wealth and Improving Legacy Code with M. Scott Ford - Episode Notes
- 00:00 intro
- 01:57 makers vs menders
- 03:43 menders love improving legacy codebases
- 05:06 greenfield projects are glamourized
- 06:30 greenfield-legacy projects
- 09:07 working with legacy code: tools & strategies
- 09:53 building technical wealth vs tackling 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 the bus factor
- 45:59 working with makers
- 51:24 hanging out with other menders
- 53:27 follow hexdevs
Do you feel like you’re too experienced to be a Junior but not enough to be a Senior? Feeling stuck in your career? Don’t know what to do next in your Ruby developer career?
Join Get to Senior and take control of your career. Learn from real Ruby experts. Follow guided exercises and get on the path to Senior Developer. Grab your copy now!.
Episode Links
- Scott’s LinkedIn profile
- Scott’s Twitter profile
- Scott’s Github profile
- Legacy Code Rocks
- Legacy Code Rocks Slack Group (weekly meetups at 1pm EST on Wednesdays)
- MenderCon (May 10th, 2023)
- How to Improve Code Quality on a Ruby on Rails Application
- Ruby Code Quality with Ernesto Tagwerker