Ctrl-Alt-Del: learning to love legacy code
summary
Owns a 75,000-line legacy web app written in classic ASP that still powers TV and film casting, documents a two-year AWS migration to enable deployments from GitHub without manual steps, and shows concrete techniques: build locally, spoof DNS/hosts to capture dependencies, run experiments in a sandbox, add monitoring and dashboards, and fix a 32-bit int overflow that surfaced after years. Talks continuous integration, refactoring tools, and deleting unused code to reduce risk.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Introduction to legacy code
- 3:07Code exists to solve problems
- 7:50Defining legacy code
- 12:57Reading vs writing code
- 18:41Fear of legacy systems
- 22:34Learning from real systems
- 27:55Scientific method for code
- 32:09Taking control of legacy
- 35:45Silent legacy systems
- 38:13Software as ongoing commitment
- 42:10When to delete code
- 45:21Legacy code is everywhere
- 46:31Q&A: Hiring for legacy code
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