All Software Architecture, All the Time
June 10-13, 2019
San Jose, CA
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Observing the light at the end of the legacy tunnel

Isobel Redelmeier (LightStep)
11:00am–11:45am Wednesday, June 12, 2019
Secondary topics:  Best Practice
Average rating: ***..
(3.25, 4 ratings)

Who is this presentation for?

  • Software architects and managers

Level

Intermediate

Prerequisite knowledge

  • Experience wrangling legacy code
  • No familiarity with observability required

What you'll learn

  • Learn how to instrument old code bases so that you can modernize it more effectively and efficiently

Description

How can we leverage observability to deal with legacy code?

This question is among those most often asked by new observability practitioners. The answer is, unfortunately, more nebulous. Modern observability tools offer so much to help keep fresh code, well, fresh. That’s great news for greenfield code, but most code sooner or later succumbs to the woes of time and team churn. How do you apply observability to code that hasn’t been instrumented since day one?

Isobel Redelmeier explores how to use tracing and other observability practices to tame legacy spaghetti. No team has infinite time or hands, and observability can help you figure out where your limited resources can have the most impact. Join in to learn how to determine critical paths and low-hanging performance fruit.

Photo of Isobel Redelmeier

Isobel Redelmeier

LightStep

Isobel Redelmeier works on open source software at LightStep, where she focuses on OpenTracing and other observability solutions to improve performance management across distributed systems. She learned firsthand how difficult, and how valuable, observability can be when working at Pivotal, where she pushed code in about 10 languages to different production systems while working with Pivotal Labs. She later focused on security in Cloud Foundry.