Marianne Bellotti - Building Empathy by Asking, "How Would You Write This in 2007?"

Maintainable

Robby has a chat with Marianne Bellotti (she/her/hers), the Engineering Manager at Rebellion Defense. Marianne is the author of the books, “Hiring Engineers” and “Kill it with Fire”. She talks about the maintainability of software being about whether software can be changed and how easily changes can be made to it. She dives into her experience with legacy modernization and talks about how to effectively judge software.

Marianne also shares her insights on the challenges teams face when people don't understand how older code works, the value of developing a plan around tests to naturally build confidence within an organization, why it's important to have a safe space to break things (e.g., staging/QA environments), how onboarding metrics can be difficult to compare when dealing with regulatory systems, and building empathy toward previous engineers on a project. Tune in for that and a whole lot more in this value-packed 61-minute episode.

Book Recommendations:

• Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems by Sidney Dekker

Helpful Links:

• Kill it with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones) by Marianne Bellotti
• Website - bellotti.tech
• https://github.com/mbellotti
• Twitter - twitter.com/bellmar

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