Engineers spend the vast majority of their careers analysing, maintaining, and modifying existing systems. Those systems have often already been subject to the forces of time and change, and chief among those forces is the loss of context about how the system works.
Join expert Chelsea Troy to explore how to recover lost context and how to tell when you have enough information to attempt changes to legacy code. You’ll examine how to make a legacy code base easier to modify and chart a path to refactoring for learning, for making changes, and for ensuring that future changes are easier. You’ll also learn realistic strategies for preventing future context loss to keep the code base maintainable over the long term.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
- Answer questions about the code base ahead of making a change.
- Identify relatively low-risk starting points for change.
- Embark on low-risk initial changes to make a code base more maintainable.
- Ramp up to features and modifications.
- Move code from an interim “healing” state to a more maintainable future.
- Hold the right information in the right places for future use.
This workshop is for you because…
- You’ve had to implement code changes that made you feel icky because you didn’t have time to do it the right way.
- You’ve struggled to explain to folks on the business side why it’s important to have time to refactor.
- You’ve come up with functional, useful design changes and unexpectedly run into resistance from your very own teammates.
- You’ve noticed that a lot of the work of maintaining a code base—talking to people, understanding the code, making decisions—looks to the business like not working, and you’d like that work to be visible, valued, appreciated, and rewarded.
Prerequisites
- A working knowledge of Java and/or Kotlin is helpful.
- You will be asked to clone a repository and follow a setup guide ahead of the workshop.
Testimonials
Chelsea has the know-how to take an organisation to the next level. Her ability to analyse data and grasp what it takes to get a message out there to the right people was immediately evident to us. In no uncertain terms, Chelsea is a powerful communicator with an abundance of energy and ideas.
– Anonymous customer feedback
We brought Chelsea in for a consulting engagement to pair with our team as they worked on our company's first iOS application. The team broke through several blocking issues, could get immediate answers to the "right" way to do things without hours of research, and has maintained a higher level of productivity after. We didn't just get important work done, we learned a lot that made us better later.
– Anonymous customer feedback