Legacy Code Rocks

One of the reasons why it is difficult to work with legacy code is the lack of preserving the contextual reasons for past coding choices. 

Today we talk with Chelsea Troy, a Machine Learning Team Lead at Mozilla and a computer science lecturer at the University of Chicago. She tells us about the value of code review in the software-building process and why code review should not be treated solely as a mech...

Mending code while it is running is risky. One wrong move and a small change can bring the entire system to a halt. 

Today we talk with Edward Hieatt, Chief Customer Officer at Mechanical Orchard, a GenAI native company that modernizes critical legacy applications without disrupting what they are doing. He tells us how to use AI to identify system dependencies, why it is important to first understand data ...

AI proves to be great at writing new code, but what are its capabilities when it comes to mending the old one?

Today we talk with Ray Myers, a legacy code expert and sceptical enthusiast for AI. With 16 years of software engineering experience, he focuses on collective lessons learned to improve our existing systems and organizations. He tells us where is the place of AI in legacy code mending, whether AI ...

Many of the largest companies rely on third-party code to run critical parts of their software. However, there's often little focus on ensuring the quality of these external dependencies.

Today we speak with Feross Aboukhadijeh, CEO and founder of Socket, a developer-first security platform. Socket helps developers and security teams release software faster and reduce time spent on security busywork. Feros...

How do the love for vintage computers and test automation come together? Can one inspire another and how?

Today we talk with Sophia Mckeever, a software development engineer at Pokemon Company International, a test automation framework architect, and a computer historian. She tells us what led her to collect vintage computers, how they evolved into machines we work on today, and what is the connecting thre...

In Kubernetes, security is a joint effort between security engineers and DevOps. A perfect tool to bring these two together is Kubescape, an open-source Kubernetes security project. 

Today, we talk with Shauli Rozen, the CEO of ARMO, the company behind Kubescape. Shauli has more than fifteen years of experience in technology, B2B management, and business development. He tells us about the advantages of Kub...

Reviewing logs for security threats and operational functions can be a cumbersome task. Attention is a finite resource, and it is easy to miss something when faced with megabytes of data. 

Today, we talk with Joe Gross, the Director of Solutions Engineering at Graylog, a leading centralized log management solution for capturing, storing, and enabling real-time analysis of terabytes of machine data. Joe gui...

Cyber security is not a core activity of most software development companies. It is an outsourced activity that simply has to be done so that we can deploy our core services. 

Today, we talk with Scott McCrady, CEO of SolCyber Managed Security Services and an accomplished international executive with broad experience in sales, business development, and the operations side of a cloud-based and information s...

How to set up developers for success? For the longest time, companies left developers to their own devices to figure out the workflows and tools they will be using. As the teams grew, so did their problems due to the lack of established procedures and good practices. 

Today, we talk with Ramiro Berrelleza, the CEO and co-founder of Okteto, the leading platform for developer experience automation. Ramiro is...

Back in August 2023, HashiCorp announced that after nine years of Terraform being open source under the MPL license, they were switching it to a non-open source BSL license. This sent shockwaves through the software development community. 

Today we talk with Cory O'Daniel, a CEO and co-founder of Massdriver, a company helping improve developers' experience of cloud operations, offering self-service capabil...

Simply knowing what is in your software is not any guarantee of safety. We need to know what that software does versus what we expect it to do. We need to know its rules of behavior. 

Today, we talk with Andrew Hendela, a founder of Karambit.ai, a company dedicated to automatically detecting malware and securing your software supply chain. Andrew worked for over a decade automating hard cybersecurity probl...

In the age of rising AI, we cannot neglect the topic of the social and political consequences of the code we leave behind. Today, we talk with Amy Newell, a 24-year veteran of the tech industry and an avid activist in issues spanning from local politics to tech. Amy discusses how to engage with emerging technologies, how to use them, and how to create them while being cognisant of the harm we can inadvertently cause al...

Automating refactoring and code transformation is a fascinating and efficient way to eliminate technical debt. Today, we talk with Jonathan Schneider, a Co-Founder and CEO of Moderne, Inc., and a former senior Software Engineer at Netflix, where he created Netflix Rewrite - a large-scale automated refactoring tool for Java codebases. Jonathan is also the author of SRE with Java Microservices. Jonathan tells us about t...

Imagine if you could counter ransomware by exploiting it to create a backup of your attacked data for you. Now, that would be disruptive! 

Today, we talk with Lance James. James is an experienced cybersecurity specialist with 25 years of experience in the field. Building on his programming, network security, digital forensics, malware research, and counterintelligence experience, Lance tells us how to use ...

Going from monolith to microservices is one of the most popular topics in software engineering. But jumping the boat without understanding why can be a dangerous (and expensive) adventure. 

Today we talk with Nelida Velazquez. Nelida is a senior software engineer at Cobalt, a cyber security company that offers pentest as a service. As a backend developer, she had numerous opportunities to witness ill-infor...

Microsoft invited the Legacy Code Rocks team to attend Microsoft Build Conference and gave us access to the studio on the third floor of the Seattle Convention Center. In this episode, we talk with Raymond Chen, a senior software engineer at Microsoft.  

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far...

Microsoft invited the Legacy Code Rocks team to attend Microsoft Build Conference and gave us access to the studio on the third floor of the Seattle Convention Center. In this episode, we talk with Debbie O’Brien and Max Schmitt, both part of the Microsoft Playwright team.. 

Playwright is a tool developed by Microsoft that allows developers to automate the testing of web applications.. Playwright's unique ...

Microsoft invited the Legacy Code Rocks team to attend Microsoft Build Conference and gave us access to the studio on the third floor of the Seattle Convention Center. In this episode, we talk with Kayla Cinnamon, the first of the three guests we had an opportunity to chat with at the Conference. 

Kayla is a Product Manager with Microsoft. She’s currently working on Microsoft Dev Home and helps out the Mic...

How many of your passwords do you actually know? Now, how many of those passwords are already on the black web? We are living in a fascinating age of transition from personalised passwords dependent on text inputs and our memory to more advanced access solutions. 

To help us navigate this evolution, we talk with Justin Richer. Justin is a technologist working on a wide variety of projects and problems thro...