World Congress 2026 Europe - Virtual Stage • Jul 3, 2026 • Session details

Chesterton's Fence - Don't Tear Down the Fence

A blindly repurposed configuration flag once caused a catastrophic trading glitch. Before deleting legacy code, treat it as survived code and decode its hidden dependencies.

Chesterton's Fence - Don't Tear Down the Fence thumbnail

Checking access…

Playback and chapters load privately for Free videos.

Matching moments

2:30 min

Overcoming the human challenges of software maintenance

Robby Russell · Coffee With Developers

2:40 min

Balancing technical fail-safes with proactive moral compasses

Torsten Stiller

Torsten Stiller · World Congress 2025

2:05 min

Understanding legacy code through software archeology analysis techniques

Markus Harrer

Markus Harrer · World Congress 2025

6:44 min

Balancing technical debt reduction with feature delivery

Jens Happe

Jens Happe · LIVE

3:28 min

Applying the Boy Scout rule to software maintenance

timtebeek

timtebeek · World Congress 2024

2:47 min

Diagnosing the persistence of legacy runtime code architectures

Alfonso Graziano

Alfonso Graziano · Coffee With Developers

More from World Congress 2026 Europe - Virtual Stage

One Does Not Simply Make Architecture Decisions Alone thumbnail

One Does Not Simply Make Architecture Decisions Alone

Vladas Diržys

From Black Box to Glass Box : Bedrock AgentCore Observability thumbnail

From Black Box to Glass Box : Bedrock AgentCore Observability

Yasemin Aktürk · AWS

Leading in Rhythm: How Women Make Better Decisions with Biological Intelligence thumbnail

Leading in Rhythm: How Women Make Better Decisions with Biological Intelligence

Julia Grosse · Founder and CEO

Better Together: Leveraging Your Observability Tools as a SIEM thumbnail

Better Together: Leveraging Your Observability Tools as a SIEM

Mathias Palmersheim · VictoriaMetrics

ChatGPT Apps: From Chat to Checkout thumbnail

ChatGPT Apps: From Chat to Checkout

Aaron Koivunen · tedix.dev

Interior Decorating (TypeScript Decorators) thumbnail

Interior Decorating (TypeScript Decorators)

Michael Dowden · Andromeda Galactic Solutions

Upcoming sessions on this topic

A Tale of Two Systems: Design and Reality

Mandeep Singh

Kyndryl

Lead Software Engineer

From Monolith to Phases: Restructuring Terraform Deployments That Work in Any Cloud

Naveen Kumar Kalapala

Infosys Ltd

Lead Cloud Engineer

Beware of Strangers Bearing Code: Open Source Trust in the Agent Era

Vikram Vaswani

Consultant

AI at the Door, Turning ‘Tech Debt Panic’ into ‘Tech Debt Repairs’

Prerit Munjal

Groupon

Senior Technical Product Manager

The 200,000 line code repository: My AI wrote 1000 lines. I needed 100.

Hardik Gupta

IBM

Software Developer

Multi-Cloud Isn't a Project. It's a Side Effect.

Antonio Mendoza Pérez

Temporal Technologies

Staff Developer Success Engineer
Gaurav Thadani

Temporal

Staff Developer Success Engineer

Related videos

Shipping Quality Software In Hostile Environments thumbnail

Shipping Quality Software In Hostile Environments

Luka Kladaric

World Congress · 2021

Keep your code refactorable thumbnail

Keep your code refactorable

Gerrit Stapper

World Congress · 2022

Get ready for new features - the legacy challenge thumbnail

Get ready for new features - the legacy challenge

Hans Hosea Schäfer

LIVE · Nov 2023

Why (most) software projects fail silently... thumbnail

Why (most) software projects fail silently...

Hendrik Lösch · ZEISS Digital Solution

World Congress · 2025

How to TDD in legacy code thumbnail

How to TDD in legacy code

Gil Zilberfeld

JS Congress · 2021

Code Style in Practice: Balancing Preferences and Consistency thumbnail

Code Style in Practice: Balancing Preferences and Consistency

Angelika Shvets · Global-e

World Congress Europe · 2026

Related articles

DC

Daniel Cranney

How to Avoid Over-Engineering

In today’s software development world, the demand for designing applications that are both robust and easy to maintain is more pressing than ever. Many developers encounter the architectural chaos ...

almost 2 years ago

A series of code blocks with 'X's on showing they are incorrect, with one CSS block shown as the correct answer.

CH

Chris Heilmann

Dev Digest 104 - Fight for your right to 3rd party

Last Friday's Dev Digest was a spotlight issue covering the problem of Apple's plan to disallow web applications to be added to the homescreen and run as standalone apps. We had an expert round and...

over 2 years ago

Dev Digest 104 - Fight for your right to 3rd party

CH

Chris Heilmann

Dev Digest 134 - Where pixels sing?

News and ArticlesWeAreDevelopers LIVE Data and Security Day is on Wednesday, 25/09/2024. Learn about OPC UA Updates, Best Practices for Using GitHub Secrets, Passwordless Web 1.5, Emerging AI Secur...

about 2 years ago

Dev Digest 134 - Where pixels sing?

CH

Chris Heilmann

Dev Digest 129 - Now that's what I call private data!

News and ArticlesAfter declaring Google a monopoly there are now considerations to force it to break up - isn't that what the whole Alphabet thing was about? In the last act of Crowdstrike coverage...

about 2 years ago

Dev Digest 129 - Now that's what I call private data!

From learning to earning

Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.

Software Development Engineer 1

Bengaluru, India

Starter Hybrid · 3 days on-site Java Spring

Software Development Engineer 1

Bengaluru, India

Starter Hybrid · 3 days on-site Java

Principal Software Engineer, Copilot Code Review

San Francisco, CA, United States

Expert Ruby Golang Github

Software Development Engineer 1

Bengaluru, India

Starter Hybrid · 3 days on-site Java

Senior Software Engineer, Vulnerability Management

Expert $329k Remote Ruby Golang Docker

Staff Security Data Engineer

Experienced Remote Github Airflow Terraform