Freshbooks spaghetti to SOA

Entertaining and pragmatic talk from someone who's been there. Thanks Mark!

Fantastic talk. A story from the trenches of legacy code, concentrating on management tactics for the modernization approach. Less emphasis on SOA per se and more on the attitude/mentality of the transition process.

Not the first time I've seen Mark talk, has a great stage presence and communicates his thoughts and ideas very well. Really awesome to hear some real life stories about fixing old code, there was a great mix of theory and practicality. Delivery of the jokes and humorous aspects of the talk landed well and were in a good proportion for my taste. Awesome talk, thanks for giving it!

As always, Mark was both informative and entertaining. He put his own mistakes/vulnerabilities on display in a way we could all relate to ... and used them as teaching opportunities to help us all be better developers.

Lots of great wisdom in this talk, including emphasis on soft skills necessary to build an effective team, investments in tooling, giving the entire team access to all the code managed by everyone else, keeping a documented team vision up-to-date. Mark explained multiple ways where splitting things into milestones, whether projects or problems or code standards, added value and helped defeat the "monster" Freshbooks faced when needing to survive and grow.

Mark also celebrated the contributions made to his team's success,including by audience members in the room.

Mark is highly knowledgeable and relatable. Lots of laughs all around the room.

Great value from experiences in-the-trenches. "If we can do it, then you probably can too!"

Very useful talk and loved the sense of humour. :) well done!

Excellent talk. Very down to earth and inspiring on how to approach legacy nightmares.

This talk made me feel a *lot* better about my old code. I enjoyed Mark's war stories as well as how they took small, but regular, steps to get where they wanted to go.

Mark always does a great job in his presentations. His speaking style has the ability to make you feel comfortable even with complex and complicated topics.

I really enjoyed the talk, I think that shining the light on the dark days of the FreshBooks codebase and then essentially proving you can build yourself out of it offers a lot of support to refactor side of the refactor vs rewrite debate.

My favourite talk of the day. Provided some good advice on how to tackle the spaghetti monster I inherited, and helped provide some perspective; I'm not in nearly as scary a situation as the one Mark described. Funny and entertaining talk to boot!

Mark's talk was both interesting and entertaining. It's always nice to hear that I'm not the only one battling a legacy codebase.

Fantastic talk, Mark. Not a lot to take a way technically but plenty to glean from the road map and execution of updating a legacy code base. Helps you not only sympathize with the original developers who were writing code that works in order to ship, but also identify with those forced to handle the subsequent cleanup and the problems encountered along the way with project stakeholders.