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115: Betterer with Craig Spence

Making widespread changes to a codebase can be hard!


Your team starts a long-lived branch that is difficult to maintain and often impossible to merge; you and your team-mates agree to improve the code slowly over time, but you all forget this agreement, and the improvement never happens. But what if there were a tool that keeps you on track to steadily improve your code without making you feel like losing control over these improvements?

Today we talk with Craig Spence, a senior engineer at Spotify and a creator of Betterer - a tool that helps with incremental improvements of big codebases and legacy systems. Craig tells us how Betterer works, how it differs from other debugging tools, and what are the plans for its improvements. 

When you finish listening to the episode, connect with Craig on LinkedIn and Twitter, and be sure to check out Betterer on GitHub

Mentioned in this episode:

Craig on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-spence/

Craig on Twitter at https://twitter.com/phenomnominal

Betterer on GitHub at https://phenomnomnominal.github.io/betterer/docs/introduction

Touca at https://touca.io 

Additional Info

Legacy Code Rocks

Legacy Code Rocks explores the world of modernizing existing software applications.

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In this show, hosts M. Scott Ford and Ray Myers are out to change the way you think about legacy code.

If you're like a lot of people, when you hear the words "legacy code" it conjures up images of big mainframes and archaic punch card machines. While that's true — it only tells a small part of the story. The code you leave behind is your legacy, so let's make it a good one.

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