Robby has a chat with former Senior Software Engineer at Remotion, Avery Quinn, about the benefits of having a skeleton project that you can experiment with when weighing up different dependencies, tips for onboarding engineers to your teams, things to consider when building desktop applications, what it is like to work as a consultant and later at a product company, and many more valuable topics around software engineering.

Robby has a chat with the CEO of Lean Mind and Author of Código Sostenible, Carlos Blé, about the four important traits of well-maintained software, examples of what maintainable tests are, the benefits of mutation testing and exploratory testing, services that Lean Mind offers, how to be a good guest in another team's codebase, and so much more.

Robby has a chat with Executive and Leadership Coach, Lena Reinhard (she/her/hers), about how well-maintained software is supposed to serve a business’s goals and continuously improve not just reactively, the importance of organizations investing in their engineering team's skills, software as a team sport, strategies for managing technical debt, and so much more.

Robby has a chat with software engineer, trainer, and author of the book Grokking Simplicity, Eric Normand (he/him/his), about the healthy characteristics of well-maintained software, the pros, and cons of microservices in small organizations, why teams need to ensure they know where they're going with the future of their codebase, and many more awesome topics.

Robby has a chat with Henrik Warne (he/him/his), the Senior Software Engineer at Talos, about the importance of code having structure early on, the importance of engineers being able to read, run, and test code when they join a project, why Henrik feels there is no such thing as software maintainance, how software is better seen as a product versus a project, why all software engineers should spend a portion of their time working on bugs, and much more.

Robby has a chat with Andy Croll (he/him/his), the CTO at CoverageBook, about why the maintainability of software can only be ensured if there is a core focus on the readability of code, the rationale for why weird things in our code should stay weird until we find a better way to express it, his career journey from the front end into the backend, how to manage technical debt in a small team, and so much more.

Robby has a chat with Marianne Bellotti (she/her/hers), the Engineering Manager at Rebellion Defense, about legacy modernization and how to effectively judge software, challenges teams face when people don't understand how older code works, the value of developing a plan around tests to naturally build confidence within an organization, why it's important to have a safe space to break things (e.g., staging/QA environments), and much more.

Robby has a chat with Arpit Mohan, the Co-Founder and CTO of Appsmith, about the importance of engineers writing code for humans and not machines while also focusing a lot on readability, how useful code comments are crucial in facilitating well-maintained software, the importance of conveying the why over the how behind any code being developed, and much much more.

Robby has a chat with Noah Clark, a consulting applications developer at Merchants Bonding Company, about how team dynamics effectively facilitates the maintainability of software, why engineers should ensure that their software code leans on the business domain especially when it comes to naming things, how teams can determine when it’s necessary to refactor and/or improve existing software, and so much more.

Robby has a chat with the Engineering Manager at Planet Argon, Ben Parisot, about the importance of thorough documentation and paper trail, how documentation just needs to be used once to be considered valuable, the value of establishing processes to audit and improve documentation, why onboarding developers should be standardized, and much more on software development.

Robby has a chat with Stefanni Brasil, the Co-founder and Educator at hexdevs, Co-creator of the Get to Senior online course and community, and most recently joined thoughtbot as a developer, about why teams should agree on conventions before coding starts, the value of writing decisions down for our future-selves, how teams flourish when everyone is comfortable speaking up, how to be a good guest in another team's codebase (as a consultant), and so much more.

Robby has a chat with Andrea Goulet, the CEO of Corgibytes, about a wide variety of interesting software development topics including why the maintainability of software comes down to trust, the usefulness of the term technical debt, how to speak with "the business people" to ensure we have shared goals as we approach our software writing, the impact of empathy in software development, and so much more.

Robby has a chat with Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, John Ousterhout, about how software design is critical in ensuring the continuous maintainability of software, what problem decomposition is all about, his one-of-a-kind course in software design, the art of writing good code comments, differences between tactical and strategic programming, and much much more.

Robby has a chat with Courtney Wilburn (She/Her/Hers), the Sr. Engineering Manager at Elastic Cloud, about why software relies on enthusiasm about its long-term success, the traits of excellent documentation, Courtney’s approach to joining a software team, the metaphor technical debt and how Courtney’s team discusses, prioritizes, and documents what and when they will (or not) focus on them, the challenges of hiring junior-level engineers and what we can do to foster mentorship in our teams,...

Robby has a chat with Nelida Velazquez, a Senior Software Engineer at Cobalt Labs about documentation, testing, and consistency as the three things that are critical to ensuring that software is maintainable, best practices versus team agreements, things an engineer should consider when they're the new person on a team, why engineers view documentation as part of the deliverables, how to properly address technical debt, and so much more.

Robby has a chat with Casey Watts!, the Founder at Happy and Effective and the author of Debugging Your Brain, about how having a deliberately prioritized engineering backlog is the best way to ensure the maintainability of software, the importance of engineers having more autonomy and ownership in the projects they work on, strategies for managing technical debt, and so much more.

Robby brings on the official maintainer and major contributor for the Oh My Zsh project, Marc Cornellà, to share his wisdom on the characteristics of well-maintained proprietary software, whether the same characteristics apply when it comes to opensource software, how engineering teams can organize and prioritize a popular project that has a consistent 400 to 500 open pull-requests from people across the planet, and so much more. Enjoy!

Robby has a chat with the CEO and Co-Founder of CodeSee, Shanea Leven, about how the relatively unknown shift left movement helps in writing maintainable and resilient code, the importance of code visibility, the great effectiveness of CodeSee in managing documentation, the challenges that teams face when they don't teach their developers the best practices in documentation, how Codesee's team implements tech-debt sprints every 6 to 8 weeks, what spatial reasoning is, and so much more. Don’t...

Robby has a chat with Greg Foster, the Co-founder and CTO of Graphite, an open-source CLI and code review dashboard built for engineers who want to write and review smaller pull requests, stay unblocked, and ship faster. They cover a variety of topics including some common traits of maintainable software, challenges that come with SOAs versus monolithics, why monorepos might be a better approach for your software team's workflow, and types of metrics a team should track. Stay tuned for more!

Robby has a chat with Urban Hafner, a Senior Software Developer at Risk Methods, about the value of consistent code base maintainance, how team attrition negatively affects the maintainability of code, challenges that startups face when the original agency and/or developers depart from their software projects, the importance of measuring your progress on maintenance work to keep the momentum up, and a lot more of Urban’s wealth of engineering wisdom.

Robby has a chat with the VP of Engineering at ConvertKit, Amy Isikoff Newell, about why perfection is the enemy of software development, career path options for engineers between being an individual contributor and transitioning into management, how managers can reduce drag on their engineering teams, how technical debt can impact both the recruitment and retention of software engineers, and so much more.

On this episode, Robby was invited to join a panel of several hosts from podcasts at RailsConf 2022 in Portland, Oregon.

Robby has a chat with Chelsea Troy, the Staff Software Engineer on machine learning and backend systems at Mozilla. Chelsea will impart her valuable knowledge on how we can go about making software more maintainable, strategies we can use to quantify maintenance work, documenting code with more helpful error messages that provide more context, and so much more.

Robby has a chat with Paula Paul, a distinguished engineer with Greyshore Associates, where she helps organizations adopt cloud-native technology and serves the community as an ABI Syster, diversity speaker, and mentor. Paula will talk about her long experience of software modernization and share her very valuable software engineering wisdom.

Robby has a chat with Ben Halpern, the creator of Dev.to and a Co-Founder of Forem, about what well-maintained software should really look like, how to go about naming things in a software application, why engineers should avoid overcorrecting each time they start up a new software project, and things to consider before open-sourcing software. Enjoy!