José Valim: Designing a Language You Can Maintain for Decades
What changes when the software you’re maintaining is a programming language that thousands of other applications depend on? José Valim joins...
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Maintainable
Feel like you’re hitting a wall with your existing software projects? You're not alone. On the Maintainable software podcast, we speak with seasoned practitioners who have worked past the pr...
Episodes
20 of 233 episodes
John Athayde: Maintaining the User Side of Software
The user interface of a long-lived application carries years of technical decisions, design choices, and organizational history. John Athayd...
Kristin Isaac: The Customer Doesn’t Care About Your Technical Debt
Customers don’t ask you to pay down technical debt. They notice when the product is slow, unreliable, or keeps breaking in the same damn way...
David Hayes: Boring Software, Clear Incentives, and Better Checklists
David Hayes believes maintainable software starts with a simple idea: fitness for purpose.
Diana Pfeil: Building Confidence in Probabilistic Systems
Software powered by AI can change its behavior without a deployment, leaving teams to maintain code, data, prompts, models, and the uncertai...
Chris Coyier: The Long Game of Maintaining CodePen
Chris Coyier, co-founder of CodePen, joins Robby to reflect on what it takes to maintain software over the long haul. Drawing from CodePen’s...
Sally Lait: Confidence Is the Real Metric
Sally Lait joins Robby to explore why confidence might be the most important signal of software maintainability. They dig into the cultural...
Rein Henrichs: The Real Work of Maintenance Happens Before You Touch the Code
Most teams treat maintenance like a coding problem. Rein Henrichs argues the real work starts much earlier… in how teams understand the syst...
Russ Olsen: The Hidden Cost of Forgetting Why the Code Looks Like That
Software doesn’t become hard to maintain only because the code is messy. It often becomes hard to maintain because the reasoning behind it d...
Joel Oliveira: Predictability Is a Maintainability Feature
Long-lived software systems rarely stay tidy. Over time they accumulate decisions, workarounds, and layers of history that can make even sim...
Lucas Roesler: The Fast Feedback Loop Advantage
Maintaining software over time rarely fails because of one bad decision. It fails because teams stop getting clear signals… and start guessi...
Brittany Ellich: Using AI to Maintain Software, Not Rewrite It
Rewrites are seductive. Clean slates promise clarity, speed, and “doing it right this time.” In practice, they’re often late, over budget, a...
Kent L Beck: You’re Ignoring Optionality… and Paying for It
Kent Beck: You’re Ignoring Optionality… and Paying for It In this episode of Maintainable , Robby speaks with Kent Beck , a foundational voi...
Don MacKinnon: Why Simplicity Beats Cleverness in Software Design
Episode Highlights [00:00:48] What Makes Software Maintainable Don explains why unnecessary complexity is the biggest barrier to maintainabi...
Chris Zetter: Building a Database to Better Understand Maintainability
Episode Summary In this conversation, Robby sits down with software engineer and author Chris Zetter to explore what building a relational d...
Denis Rechkunov: When Consistency Becomes a Culture
Maintaining consistency across a sprawling codebase is one of the hardest challenges in software engineering. Denis Rechkunov , a Principal...
Nathan Ladd: Relentless Improvement and the Cost of Neglect
Episode Notes The discussion moves into how standards evolve beyond tools, the trade-offs of monocultures vs. consensus-driven teams, and wh...
Taylor Otwell: What 14 Years of Laravel Taught Me About Maintainability
Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel and CEO of Laravel LLC, joins Robby to reflect on his 14-year journey building and maintaining one of the...
Sara Jackson: Why Resilience Is a Team Sport
Robby is joined by Sara Jackson , Senior Developer at thoughtbot , to explore the practical ways teams can foster resilience—not just in the...
Joel Chippindale: Why High-Quality Software Isn’t About Developer Skill Alone
CTO coach Joel Chippindale joins Robby to share what he's learned over two decades of building and leading software teams. Joel argues that...