Nursing Your Code Back to Health

Nursing Your Code Back to Health by Jason Gedge

“When writing code, we never have the full picture, or even know exactly where things will end up. This leads to deliberately, or accidentally, introducing small amounts of technical debt along the way, which can easily snowball out of control if ignored for too long.

In this talk we look at some typical patterns of technical debt and how to identify them. We will then learn how we can address these areas of technical debt in our codebases using a variety of static analysis techniques, making use of git history and Ruby’s AbstractSyntaxTree module.”

Jason is a Staff Developer on the Architecture Patterns team at Shopify. In the past, he spearheaded the first iteration of Shopify’s self-serve cloud platform. Nowadays, he focuses on reducing technical debt and improving software architecture at Shopify, as well as contributing to the #crazy-cat-people Slack channel. Before Shopify, he was responsible for developer productivity at YouTube’s San Bruno office.