Several years ago, today's guest Michael Feathers published a book called Working Effectively with Legacy Code. This book introduced ways of wrangling large codebases. In the book, Feather's discussed leveraging unit tests to introduce--not only a validation of correctness but also-- documentation on a system's operation, ways to decouple/modularize monolithic code, and 24 different techniques to introduce change safely. Today on the podcast, Wes Reisz and Michael Feathers go back and review the book. The two spend some time reviewing key concepts from the book and then discuss how the techniques can be applied today. The two wrap with a discussion on what might change in a new version of the book. 

Read a transcript of this interview:  https://bit.ly/3qREZrL

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Transcript

Michael Feathers: Looking Back at Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Jonas Bonér, CTO of LightBend and creator Akka, discusses using Akka when developing distributed systems. He talks about the Actor Model, and how every Microservice needs to be viewed as a system to be successful. 

Why listen to this podcast:

 - Akka is JVM-based framework design for developing distributed systems leveraging the Actor Model - an approach for writing concurrent systems that treat actors as universal primitives and the most successful model with abstraction has been streaming
 - Circuit breakers in Akka are a backup and retry policy; they protect you by capturing failure data and allow you to roll back 
 - Every Microservice needs to be viewed as a system, it needs to have multiple parts that run on different machines in order to function and be fully resilient - thus is a Microsystem
 - Two different trends have emerged when it comes to hardware and environments: one is the trend toward Multi-core, the is a movement toward virtualized environments and the cloud
 - Saga pattern of managing long running transactions in a distributed system fits very well with messaging style architectures

Notes and links can be found on: http://bit.ly/2kwB2eB

Akka
The Actor Model
When Akka and the Actor Model is the perfect choice
Circuit breakers patterns in distributed systems
Two trends toward Multi-core
Reactive Manifesto
Event Driven vs. Message Driven
Reactive Programming and Streams
Microliths to Microsystems
What do you have to get right before you start trying to deploy a distributed systems?
Working with ML / AI at Lightbend to understand tracing through distributed system
Saga Pattern

More on this:
Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2kwB2eB

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Show Notes

Jonas Bonér on the Actor Model, Akka, Reactive Programming, Microservices and Distributed Systems

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Michael Feathers: Looking Back at Working Effectively with Legacy Code

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