Episode 073 | Arlo Belshee - Refactoring Humanity

REFACTOR ALL THE THINGS!!!! Arlo executes reflective design on legacy code, legacy organizations, legacy relationships, and legacy ways of thinking. He executes those design changes via refactoring. By which he means something more specific than most people do. Arlo is a master at executing any change in a sequence of atomic steps, each of which can be demonstrated free of unintended side-effects. In code this doesn't even require tests. In relationships, thinking, and organizations things get a little more complicated. Also known as The Court Jester, Twenty Pounds of Crazy in a Ten Pound Bag, and occasionally Bloody Stupid, Arlo is an absurd pragmatist. As an explorer and lover of the human condition, how could he see anything but absurdity? How could he care about anything except real-world outcomes? And he absolutely loves legacy code. What could be more pragmatic? What could be more absurd? Working with legacy code requires intense, sharp creativity and open, brilliantly careful action at the same time. Making legacy code obvious to humans while maintaining full backwards compatibility is the ultimate challenge in software development. For a good time, Tweet Arlo or just hit him up in a bar sometime. Code, relationships, metacognition, emotions, and scotch: sounds like the start to a fine evening.