In this conversation with Shiv, Scott Ford, the co-founder and CTO of Corgibytes, a company focused on modernizing legacy code, shared
- How he found his interest in legacy code after about 10 years of working in various roles and organizations
- Being given bugs to fix, in his early career – and after addressing them well, taking on more responsibilities
- Deriving joy in fixing code or refactoring more than just writing new features
- Having a trigger moment while watching a PBS show on home improvement ‘This old house’, that gave due credit to the earlier architects and designers and respect their decisions, rather than calling the old work as bad or stupid
- Wanted to add new functionality to something that may not have been thought of in the original design – and apply the same principles to modernizing old software
- How he navigates and understands documentation or lack of it – for the old code
- How documentation is best recorded after an experiment is concluded, when writing code experimentally and incrementally
- Likening modernization of code to an archeologist’s way of working
- When boredom might make the code more complex, to keep oneself challenged, even to solve simple problems
- Seeing flips back and forth between static and dynamically typed languages influencing styles of coding over the years
- Similarly, centralization and decentralization themes also keep switching from time to time over the years
- How he leverages his strength of being a polyglot – among computer languages, by actually working on real world problems using these languages
Scott’s experience and thoughts on being an entrepreneur will be covered in the next episode.
M. Scott Ford is the Co-Founder & CTO of Corgibytes, where he has quietly led a software maintenance revolution for the past decade. Where most people find nothing but frustration, shame, and bugs in legacy code, Scott has centered his work around his genuine love of software modernization and helping others use joy, empathy, and technical excellence to make their systems more stable, scalable, and secure. Scott’s ideas have been featured in books such as The Innovation Delusion and as a guest lecturer at Harvard University. Scott is the author of three courses on LinkedIn Learning and he is the host of the Legacy Code Rocks! Podcast.
