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56. Updating Legacy Code

Corey Martin is a Customer Solutions Architect at Heroku. On this episode of Code[ish], he’s interviewing Joe Leo, the founder and CEO of Def Method, a service-oriented software consultancy based out of New York City. The conversation begins with Leo providing his personal definition of legacy software as being any software that is not currently in the process of being written. He emphasizes that this does not mean something is immediately obsolete once it’s been written, but that at that point an individual or company must shift its energy and focus to maintenance and improvement.

From there Martin and Leo move on to discussing how customers Def Method helps customers find solutions to their software issues. Whether a company is dealing with brownfield, greenfield or minefield software, Def Method attempts to help them determine how to deal with the problems they are faced with and how they can keep their system healthy as they continue to evolve. As Leo points out, no piece of software is future-proof or bug-free, so honesty and openness are required if a company wants to succeed. It’s Def Method’s goal to help its customers get to this point.

The pair round out the conversation by talking about Leo’s recent book, The Well-Grounded Rubyist. The text, which was originally penned by Leo’s close friend David A. Black, is considered one of the most influential pieces of writing on Ruby and Leo was brought in to help co-author the third edition, which is published by Manning Publications. Leo views The Well-Grounded Rubyist as a text book with a philosophical bent and says that his primary focus was capturing the how the language has developed throughout its history and the very real tectonic shifts it has undergone during that time.

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