Rowan Merewood (Jan 30, 2010)
Talk at PHPBenelux Conference 2010 (English - UK)
Legacy code is a burden that few developers are lucky enough to avoid in their professional lives. We'll look at how legacy code develops and some of the early warning signs to watch out for. Where it's already a problem, we'll explore the strategies that can be used to replace, isolate or integrate that code and some practical methods for achieving it. This talk will weigh up these ideas up in terms of time and cost to help you take a pragmatic approach to taming or slaying your monster.
Quicklink: http://joind.in/1242
Slides: Living with Legacy Code
Jan 30, 2010, 13:32 by harrie
Great! Although I've experienced the pain of having to work with legacy code quite often, this talk gave me a lot more insight on how to deal with those situations. I especially liked the 'realistic' approach - like taking in account that you probably haven't got unlimited time to refactor something.
Slides with the comic book covers looked awesome and the way of presenting was very good as well.
Jan 30, 2010, 13:37 by mwesten
Loved the presentation style and slides. Very unique style.
Also gave some great ways on tackling legacy-code development hell....
Jan 30, 2010, 15:56 by MissYeh
This is the 2nd talk I see of him and it met my expectations. He gets his message across and it fun to see his slides.
Jan 30, 2010, 17:14 by lornajane
I had a sneak preview of the slides for this talk and was still blown away by the whole thing. Great work Rowan :)
Jan 30, 2010, 22:46 by Martin1982
Never saw Rowan speaking but he made a superb graphical presentation, funny slides and code samples (all Frankenstein-style), and also clearly explains them all.
There wasn't much news on the horizon, except for one thing; I will finally get the order of steps and priorities right next time. And I bet that was the main goal of the presentation. Many developers will feel more comfortable after seeing this session because there will ALWAYS be legacy code.
Jan 31, 2010, 00:10 by esnoeijs
As far as I'm concerned this was the best presentation on the event. Great presentation style, great slides :), and an original topic that we all face with from time to time.
Jan 31, 2010, 15:15 by webtrix
I really liked your presentation. It was very well structured and easy to listen to. Your slides were VERY nice, I really liked the funny commic images and the overal structure of your slide.
Even for someone like me who isn't yet a known in all the area's of development and stuff, I found it very easy to follow and everything was really well explained.
I can't really find anything to criticize this talk. Keep it up Rowan, and I would really like to see more talk of you!
Jan 31, 2010, 20:26 by stefan
Some people are natural speakers, and for Rowan everything seems to come so easy. Great presentation style, great slides. And an excellent choice of subject, one that is not spoken about too often to developers.
Feb 2, 2010, 13:32 by jrutten
Good talk, great slides (loved the comics), and very good speaker.
Interesting topic, it shows how to tackle some issues a lot of developers are faced with on a daily basis.
Mar 5, 2010, 07:46 by iboulard
Enjoyed the list of useful tools in the "living with legacy code" presentation, very informative... Really cool slides too, lots of time, research and attention to details. Fantastic job!
Jan 30, 2010, 13:25 by ijansch
Excellent presentation style. If I hadn't already, I'd hire this guy :-)