Building Tomorrow’s Legacy Code, Today

Confronting legacy code and managing technical debt are inevitable aspects of building sustainable systems. Often, when we’re building new code, we don’t keep that inevitable future in mind–that the code we’re building today is the legacy code of tomorrow. In this talk, consider some of the challenges and strategies for managing legacy code, approaches to making thoughtful decisions about technical debt, and ideas for how to build with the future in mind. We’ll discuss when to refactor or rewrite, how to manage technical debt, and best practices for creating maintainable systems.

Speaker

Shawna Martell

Senior Staff Engineer @Carta

Shawna Martell is a Senior Staff Engineer at Carta, Inc. Her previous experience includes Director of Software Engineering for Yahoo's Big Data Platform, and she was one of the original engineers on Wolfram|Alpha. She holds an MS in Computer Science from Syracuse University and an MBA from the University of Illinois. Beyond her professional pursuits, she channels her passion into volunteering in local politics and finds solace in the world of podcasts.

Read more
Find Shawna Martell at:

Date

Wednesday Nov 20 / 03:55PM PST ( 50 minutes )

Location

Ballroom A

Topics

Legacy Code Technical Debt Code Sustainability

Share

Share Share

From the same track

Session Architecture

One Network: Cloud-Agnostic Service and Policy-Oriented Network Architecture

Wednesday Nov 20 / 11:45AM PST

In this age of an interconnected world, One Network helps customers to simplify deployment of their products and services by providing a unified service and policy oriented network architecture that breaks down the boundaries of public and private clouds, different runtimes and tr

Speaker image - Anna Berenberg

Anna Berenberg

Engineering Fellow, Foundation Services, Service Networking, @Google Cloud, Co-Author of "Deployment Archetypes for Cloud Applications"

Session

Thinking Like an Architect

Wednesday Nov 20 / 10:35AM PST

Are architects supposed to be the smartest people on the team, making all the important decisions for developers to fill in the blanks? Certainly not. Rather, architects make everyone else smarter, for example by sharing decision models or revealing blind spots.

Speaker image - Gregor Hohpe

Gregor Hohpe

Author of "Enterprise Integration Patterns" and "The Software Architect Elevator", Cloud Architect, Member of IEEE Software Advisory Board, Previously @AWS, @Google, and @Allianz

Session Architecture

Renovate to Innovate: Fundamentals of Transforming Legacy Architecture

Wednesday Nov 20 / 01:35PM PST

Renovating old buildings and homes is commonplace, but why is technological renovation often overlooked? Just like a big home renovation adds to the quality of life, a successful architectural renovation has an outsized impact on the pace of innovation.

Speaker image - Rashmi Venugopal

Rashmi Venugopal

Product Engineering @Netflix, Speaker, Previously Product Engineer @Uber & @Microsoft, Building and Operating Reliable Distributed Systems at Scale

Session Architecture

Slack's Migration to a Cellular Architecture

Wednesday Nov 20 / 02:45PM PST

Cellular service architectures are a conceptually simple way for highly available online services to limit the impact of cascading failures and improve scale-out. So why aren't we all using them? And how do they even work in practice? 

Speaker image - Cooper Bethea

Cooper Bethea

Formerly Senior Staff Engineer and Technical Lead @Slack, Previously SRE Lead and SRE Workbook Author @Google