Living with your Legacy

on YouTube ↗59m

" summary

Lots of legacy systems still run critical business workloads: examples include VB6 and FoxPro 2.6 and enterprises with COBOL on DB2 (industry estimate ~200 billion lines of COBOL still in use). Practical tactics: keep old dev environments in virtual machines, put code in Git, add tests and refactor only the code you touch, and use an HTTP endpoint as an anti‑corruption layer plus an ORM exposing DB2 views to build a modern front end with CQRS. Research shows reducing technical debt increases developer productivity so focused maintainability pays off.

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" chapters (9)

1. 0:00Start
2. 7:50WHAT IS LEGACY?
3. 9:03DESIGN 15 YEARS OLD. LEGACY EFFECTIVELY LEGACY CODE
4. 24:37HERO PROBLEM
5. 30:52ASSESS TECHNICAL DEBT Also: tech debt was hindering maintenance, implementation of new features
6. 35:17REDUCE BUGS
7. 47:38WHAT ABOUT ADDING TESTS? TESTS HELP AVOID SIDE EFFECTS OF REFACTORING CODE
8. 54:15WINFORMS & WPF LIFE EXTENSION WITH .NET CORE 3.0
9. 55:50WORKING ON LEGACY CODE DOES NOT HAVE TO SUCK IS NOT A CAREER KILLER IS WHAT MOST OF US DO IN REAL LIFE

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