Coping with Technical Debt - Strategies, Patterns and Compromises
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"All code either is legacy code, or soon will be." -- Adam Lenda
At last check, the count of programmers working still greatly exceeds the count of projects under active development, and so we all seem doomed to "maintain" some painfully obtuse stuff that someone else wrote in a moment of self-impressed brilliance.
Having personally authored one-too-many still-born requests for "refactoring budget," Adam decided to start interacting with legacy code differently. That choice, made in 2014, eventually lead to a series of painful lessons that left more than one semicolon dripping developer blood.
Yet the painful evolution was not in vain! Eventually the team worked through the various patterns' pain points and reached something that has functioned surprisingly well for the last three years. The goal of this talk will be to equip the attendees with an understanding of something Adam has been tentatively calling "return code programming" so that they can use it to quarantine and kill their own technical-debt laden miseries.
About the presenter, Adam Lenda:
Adam Lenda has worked at the usual round of central VA suspects along with a few farther flung institutions.
Surprisingly, only one of them saw fit to fire him, and the rest, seemingly under the influence of something illegal, even claimed they'd work with him again. Thus far, no effort has been made to test these highly suspicious claims.
Yet somehow, 20 years in, he is still "solving" problems (with code). He has even spent the last 7 years nominally in charge as Software Architect for an e-commerce company.
The only likely conclusion seems to be that either his alleged incompetence is overblown, or that someone, somewhere is seriously desperate. :-)
This will be a virtual presentation.