Chris Zetter: Building a Database to Better Understand Maintainability

Episode 214

Episode Summary

In this conversation, Robby sits down with software engineer and author Chris Zetter to explore what building a relational database from scratch can teach us about maintainability, arc…

Published on an hour ago

Denis Rechkunov: When Consistency Becomes a Culture

Episode 213

Maintaining consistency across a sprawling codebase is one of the hardest challenges in software engineering. Denis Rechkunov, a Principal Software Engineer at Elastic, joins Robby to share how his t…

Published on 3 weeks ago

Nathan Ladd: Relentless Improvement and the Cost of Neglect

Episode 212

Episode Notes

The discussion moves into how standards evolve beyond tools, the trade-offs of monocultures vs. consensus-driven teams, and why ownership matters when the original authors move on. Natha…

Published on 1 month ago

Taylor Otwell: What 14 Years of Laravel Taught Me About Maintainability

Episode 211

Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel and CEO of Laravel LLC, joins Robby to reflect on his 14-year journey building and maintaining one of the most popular web frameworks in the world. From its PHP 5.3 …

Published on 2 months, 3 weeks ago

Sara Jackson: Why Resilience Is a Team Sport

Episode 210

Robby is joined by Sara Jackson, Senior Developer at thoughtbot, to explore the practical ways teams can foster resilience—not just in their infrastructure, but in their everyday habits. They talk ab…

Published on 3 months, 3 weeks ago

Joel Chippindale: Why High-Quality Software Isn’t About Developer Skill Alone

Episode 209

CTO coach Joel Chippindale joins Robby to share what he's learned over two decades of building and leading software teams. Joel argues that maintainability has less to do with “clean code” and more t…

Published on 4 months, 2 weeks ago

Melanie Sumner: Why Continuous Accessibility Is a Strategic Advantage

Episode 208

Melanie Sumner: Why Continuous Accessibility Is a Strategic Advantage

Melanie Sumner, Product Accessibility Lead for Design Systems at HashiCorp, joins Robby to talk about what it takes to scale acces…

Published on 5 months, 1 week ago

Joe Masilotti: Simplify Your Stack, Ship Mobile Sooner

Episode 207

In this episode of Maintainable, Robby speaks with Joe Masilotti, an independent consultant who helps Rails teams ship mobile apps using Hotwire Native.

Joe shares his perspective on what makes softwa…

Published on 5 months, 4 weeks ago

Freedom Dumlao: What 70 Java Services Taught Me About Focus

Episode 206

Freedom Dumlao (CTO at Vestmark) joins Robby to explore what it means to maintain software at scale—and why teams sometimes need to unlearn the hype.

With two decades of experience supporting financia…

Published on 6 months, 3 weeks ago

Mercedes Bernard: Friendly Code Welcomes Everyone In

Episode 205

Mercedes Bernard, Staff Software Engineer at Kit, joins Robby to talk about what it really means to write code that lasts—and who it should be written for.

In this episode of Maintainable, Mercedes sh…

Published on 7 months, 1 week ago