Corgibytes
CodeScene
Planet Argon
Strumenta
Prager's Law
Learn what to expect, what the rules are, etc.
M. Scott Ford Co-Founder and Chief Code Whisperer, Corgibytes
M. Scott Ford is the Co-Founder and Chief Code Whisperer at Corgibytes, a software consultancy dedicated to modernizing existing codebases. Scott, who has been called the “Bob Vila of the internet”, is a polyglot developer who, at last count, is fluent in over twenty programming languages. Scott’s love of software restoration and remodeling began in college where he and his team were responsible for retrofiting the testing tools for the X-31 jet fighter. Since then, Scott has maintained a test-focused approach to his work and found the most joy in projects where an existing codebase needed to be improved. Scott is also a guest lecturer on Continuous Delivery practices at Harvard University.
As AI accelerates the pace of coding, organizations will have a hard time keeping up; acceleration isn't useful if it's driving our projects straight into a brick wall of technical debt. This presentation explores the consequences of AI-assisted coding, weighing its potential to improve productivity against the risks of deteriorating code quality.
Adam delivers a fact-based examination of the short and long-term implications of using AI assistants in software development. Drawing from extensive research analyzing over 100,000 AI-driven refactorings in real-world codebases, we scrutinize the claims made by contemporary AI tools, demonstrating that increased coding speed does not necessarily equate to true productivity. Additionally, we also look at the correctness of AI generated code, a concern for many organizations today due to the error-prone nature of current AI tools.
Finally, the talk offers strategies for succeeding with AI-assisted coding. This includes introducing a set of automated guardrails that act as feedback loops, ensuring your codebase remains maintainable even after adopting AI-assisted coding.
Adam Tornhill Founder & CTO, CodeScene
Adam Tornhill is a programmer who combines degrees in engineering and psychology. He’s the founder of CodeScene where he designs tools for code analysis. Adam is also a software researcher and author of multiple technical books, including the best selling Your Code as a Crime Scene. Adam’s other interests include music, retro computing, and martial arts.
Imagine a world where tagging technical debt doesn’t interrupt your team’s work flow. A fantasy, right? Not so! In this 30-minute live coding session, we’ll build a custom VS Code extension that will allow your devs to live that beautiful dream!
Based on Cherrybomb, an app built and used internally at Planet Argon, your new VS Code extension will transform how your team handles legacy code challenges. By integrating seamlessly into VS Code, this extension captures code selections, file paths, and line numbers to instantly create detailed Jira issues, minimizing context switching and maximizing productivity.
Technical Requirements: A modern laptop with Node, Git, and VS Code installed is recommended to follow along with the live coding demos. I will be live-coding a greenfield app and referencing a prepared VS Code workspace with pre-configured code snippets and Jira API calls.
Ben Parisot Engineering Manager, Planet Argon
Ben helps engineering teams improve processes, increase productivity, and boost morale by working with engineers to identify and solve workflow problems and develop career advancement plans that quickly level up their skills and position them as subject matter experts. Ben builds tools with JavaScript, React, and TypeScript that solve problems for his team and others. He is currently tapping the blimp at Planet Argon.
Deciphering legacy code is hard, but code idioms can help as they capture “how things are done here.” We will explore how to identify and leverage recurring idioms for refactoring and migration. The approach demonstrated is language-agnostic, and we will provide examples for RPG and Java.
In this talk, we’ll explore:
- What code idioms are and how they emerge in real-world codebases
- How mining code idioms helps developers understand legacy code more efficiently
- How recognizing idioms improves refactoring and migration strategies
- A language-agnostic approach to detecting idioms automatically
- Practical examples using RPG and Java
Whether you’re maintaining legacy systems, performing migrations, or dealing with technical debt, leveraging code idioms can make your work more predictable and efficient. Join us to learn how automated idiom mining can help you maintain and transform legacy codebases with a little more confidence.
Federico Tomassetti Founder & Managing Director, Strumenta
Federico Tomassetti is the founder of Strumenta, a company specializing in software language engineering. At Strumenta, he helps organizations modernize and transform their software assets by designing domain-specific languages, transpilers, interpreters, editors, and parsers. His work includes deep expertise in legacy code processing, in languages such as RPG, COBOL, and SAS.
Federico holds a PhD in Software Language Engineering and has extensive experience in building tooling for understanding, refactoring, and migrating complex codebases. He is a frequent speaker at international conferences, sharing insights on language engineering.
I began my career writing original, creative code at startups, but soon found myself working with more and more legacy. It’s often frustrating—but it doesn’t have to be! I’ll share my experiences and reveal strategies that make working with old code surprisingly fun, rewarding, and even profitable
I want to tell a common story about how I started out writing fresh, creative code at startups, but very soon ended up dealing with legacy code. It’s often frustrating, but it doesn’t have to be. I’ll share my experiences, explore what makes legacy code painful, and reveal systematic approaches (and even some AI tricks) that make working with old codebases surprisingly fun, rewarding, and remunerative.
Learning Outcome:
- Legacy Code is Inevitable - even the best developers will write it.
- Attitude Matters - Viewing legacy work as a creative problem-solving challenge makes it more enjoyable.
- Systematic Approaches are Indispensable - What a starter toolkit looks like, and how to start introducing these techniques
- Quality Today Prevents Pain Tomorrow - Guidance on navigating the economic arguments
- AI is an Emerging Tool - AI can assist but won't replace human intuition and comprehension in legacy work.
Dan Prager Agile Coach, Prager's Law
An early adopter of Agile, including the technical XP practices, Dan coaches and trains people in Agile and DevOps in startups, scale-ups, and larger organisations. Dan is a passionate supporter of the Australian Agile community, and a regular speaker and participant at conferences and meet-ups.
After completing his PhD in computational mathematical physics on the numerical evolution of a class of black holes, Dan left academia in the 1990’s to pursue a career in software development. He quickly discovered that trying to plan everything up front made very little sense, and went looking for better approaches. This led him to iterative and incremental approaches to creating software, fore-runners of Agile. Later he learned that Agile approaches generalise to all forms of knowledge work.
Dan is married to Andi Herman. Together they created YouPatch (a web site for turning images into patchwork quilt designs), as well as two now grown-up children, and have acquired additional now grown-up kids along the way.