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# From boy scouting to redrawing the landscape


- **Date:** Thursday, Jul 18, 2024
- **Time:** 10:50–11:20 (30 min)
- **Room:** STAGE 2 (500)
- **Event:** World Congress 2024

## Recording

[Watch recording](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1140-from-boy-scouting-to-redrawing-the-landscape)

## Description

The boy scouting rule encourages folks to leave a campsite a little better than you found it, through small clean ups. When applied to code, developers similarly apply small localized improvements as they work on a feature. But what if there’s an overwhelming amount of technical debt to clean up, and small changes only  mean you’re falling further behind?

In this talk we’ll look at automation to really make a dent in your tech debt backlog, through safe code transformations based on OpenRewrite. Next we’ll scale up these automated fixes through the Moderne Platform, and show how you can stop issues from creeping back in. Finally we’ll show how you can compose and define your own rules to extend the open source framework that is OpenRewrite.

## Speaker

### [timtebeek](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/@timtebeek)

Staff software engineer at Moderne


## Related talks at this congress

- [Explaining technical debt to management](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2024/sessions/391-explaining-technical) — JR
- [Grappling With Clunky Old Software? Start by Understanding What’s Inside!](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2024/sessions/248-grappling-with) — Luc Perard
- [Intentional Code - Minimalism in a World of Dogmatic Design](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2024/sessions/179-intentional-code) — David Whitney
- [Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire: A New Dev’s Guide to Navigating Unfamiliar Codebases](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2024/sessions/367-out-of-the-frying) — Andrew Coleburn