Building Technical Wealth and Improving Legacy Code with M. Scott Ford

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 & 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.

Episode Links

• Watch the interview on YouTube
• Episode Notes and Links
• Legacy Code Rocks
• Legacy Code Rocks Slack Group (weekly meetups at 1pm EST on Wednesdays)
• MenderCon (May 10th, 2023)
• CorgiBytes
• Scott's LinkedIn profile
• Scott's Twitter profile
• Scott's Github profile
• How to Improve Code Quality on a Ruby on Rails Application
• Ruby Code Quality with Ernesto Tagwerker
• Get to Senior

Chapters
00:00 intro 

01:57 makers vs menders 

03:43 menders love improving legacy codebases 

05:06 greenfield projects are glamorized 

06:30 greenfield-legacy projects 

09:07 working with legacy code: tools & strategies 

09:53 building technical wealth vs 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 bus factor

45:59 working with makers 

51:24 hanging out with other menders 

53:27 follow hexdevs

Episode source