Luka Kladaric

Shipping Quality Software In Hostile Environments

A 10GB monorepo. An hour-long deployment. See how a small team secretly dismantled their broken system from the inside.

Shipping Quality Software In Hostile Environments
#1about 4 minutes

Defining hostile environments and technical debt

Technical debt is the implied cost of easy solutions, manifesting as unpaginated APIs, fragile code, and broken deployment processes.

#2about 6 minutes

The compounding harm of ignoring technical debt

Common excuses for tech debt lead to a vicious cycle of lower productivity, tanking morale, and a "bad neighborhood" codebase where quality standards are abandoned.

#3about 7 minutes

A case study of a company in tech bankruptcy

A real-world example shows how a monolithic repo, on-premise tooling, and a lack of local development environments led to daily outages and technical bankruptcy.

#4about 6 minutes

How a small team fixed tech bankruptcy incrementally

A small ops team worked "in the shadows" to incrementally rebuild the build server, split the monorepo, and automate deployments using Ansible.

#5about 4 minutes

Rebranding tech debt as ongoing sustainability work

Shift the mindset from "paying down tech debt" to "sustainability work," treating it as regular hygiene necessary to maintain development velocity.

#6about 10 minutes

Gaining management buy-in for sustainability work

To convince leadership, avoid all-or-nothing projects, deliver small valuable increments, and frame the work as essential for maintaining long-term productivity.

#7about 3 minutes

Why everyone in the company should care about sustainability

Sustainable development is a shared responsibility from the CEO to junior engineers, as it ensures the company can continue to deliver results efficiently.

#8about 2 minutes

Why rewriting from scratch is almost never the answer

The software industry is filled with failed rewrites, making incremental refactoring a much safer and more effective approach than starting over.

Related jobs
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.

Matching moments

How to build structure and culture without killing agility
05:12 MIN

How to build structure and culture without killing agility

From Data Keeper to Culture Shaper: The Evolution of HR Across Growth Stages

The business case for sustainable high performance
03:34 MIN

The business case for sustainable high performance

Sustainable High Performance: Build It or Pay the Price

How AI-generated content is overwhelming open source maintainers
06:46 MIN

How AI-generated content is overwhelming open source maintainers

WeAreDevelopers LIVE – You Don’t Need JavaScript, Modern CSS and More

Why developers often undervalue their time and paid tools
02:55 MIN

Why developers often undervalue their time and paid tools

Developer Time Is Valuable - Use the Right Tools - Kilian Valkhof

Why small companies shouldn't copy big tech processes
03:10 MIN

Why small companies shouldn't copy big tech processes

Slopquatting, API Keys, Fun with Fonts, Recruiters vs AI and more - The Best of LIVE 2025 - Part 2

Comparing software maintenance to tattoo cover-ups
07:27 MIN

Comparing software maintenance to tattoo cover-ups

Devs vs. Marketers, COBOL and Copilot, Make Live Coding Easy and more - The Best of LIVE 2025 - Part 3

Organizing a developer conference for 15,000 attendees
01:32 MIN

Organizing a developer conference for 15,000 attendees

Cat Herding with Lions and Tigers - Christian Heilmann

How a broken frontend culture impacts the web
04:02 MIN

How a broken frontend culture impacts the web

WeAreDevelopers LIVE – Frontend Inspirations, Web Standards and more

Featured Partners

Related Videos

See all videos
Answering the Million Dollar Question: Why did I Break Production?29:38

Answering the Million Dollar Question: Why did I Break Production?

Luís Ventura

From Monolith Tinkering to Modern Software Development41:06

From Monolith Tinkering to Modern Software Development

Lars Gentsch

Resolving technical debts in software architecture24:38

Resolving technical debts in software architecture

Carola Lilienthal

Keep your code refactorable26:46

Keep your code refactorable

Gerrit Stapper

What Developers Get Wrong About Application Quality46:37

What Developers Get Wrong About Application Quality

Chris Riley

Why (most) software projects fail silently...28:17

Why (most) software projects fail silently...

Hendrik Lösch

Product Managers' Eternal Battle with Refactoring09:46

Product Managers' Eternal Battle with Refactoring

Justyna Walkowska

Seven Myths, Three Reasons, One Goal46:48

Seven Myths, Three Reasons, One Goal

Stefan Priebsch

Related Articles

View all articles
AG
Andre Braun, GitLab
Now is the time for industrialized software development
Now is the time for industrialized software development Recently, I received a letter from my car’s manufacturer alerting me to a recall. They had discovered a defective part and wanted to replace it. It was easily fixed, and I might have forgotten a...
Now is the time for industrialized software development

From learning to earning

Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.