Keynote - Livable Code
summary
Argues that a code base is a place to live, not a finished building, backing that claim with Conway’s Law (1967) and Brooks’s No Silver Bullet (1986), warns against big rewrites and describes the hoarders-style decay, and gives four concrete habits: don't make it worse, value improvement over consistency, inline everything, and talk more to everyone. Uses framework-as-architecture metaphors and examples (monoliths vs microservices, RailsBridge origin) and shows incremental cleanup plus team-norm change produces a genuinely livable code system.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction and models
- 6:06Conway's law and teams
- 8:44Software and creativity
- 11:12The building metaphor
- 15:12The living space model
- 19:01Livability and hoarding
- 23:19The myth of the rewrite
- 27:03Establishing group norms
- 29:39Steps to better code
- 36:41Conclusion and breakthrough
