Around a year ago, I was chatting with a good friend about an idea I had for a podcast. Over the last several years, I've learned that I've become really focused on improving existing software over building something new.

I'm not a maker. That is somewhat true, I prefer to spend more of my time improving something than making something from scratch.

The concept for the Maintainable podcast was to challenge myself with finding a diverse collection of experienced professionals from our industry--and to hear their stories about how they played a part in improving existing software.

While we, as an industry, are creating a ton of new things -- we also need to be focused on making the existing things better today than we found them yesterday. We don't need to label this as "legacy code"--it's just code.

As of today, my team has helped me publish 13 episodes (with several more on the way). I've had an opportunity to speak with people like:

• Charity Majors of Honeycomb who thinks we need to spend more time "testing" in production.
• Eileen M. Uchitelle of GitHub on how to tackle a large Ruby on Rails upgrade.
• Matt Weagle, Engineering Manager at Lyft on coaching developers on how to better discuss technical debt
• Coraline Ada Ehmke, Principal Engineer at Stitch Fix on the role of empathy in the workplace
• Pim Elshoff a software developer at Procurious about communication tactics within technical teams
• ...and several other people that I have learned a lot from.

Have you heard any of the episodes yet? (and find value in it?) If so, it would mean the world to me if you could take a moment to add a rating on Apple Podcasts. 😊

if you haven't, I invite you to listen to an episode or two at Maintainable.fm.