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Robert Annett, All successful systems become legacy eventually

Robert Annett

Biography: Robert Annett

Robert Annett has been a developer since 1995 and worked in industries from energy management to investment banking. Much of this work has involved upgrading and migrating legacy systems with the occasional green-field project (with integration to legacy systems, of course). He has worked in the IT industry long enough to realize that ALL successful systems become legacy eventually.

Twitter: @robert_annett

Presentation: Modern Legacy Systems

Track: Architectural Hangover Cure / Time: Thursday 14:30 - 15:20 / Location: Churchill Auditorium

The term "Legacy System" conjures up images of a vast mainframe (with whirring tapes and flashing diodes) running COBOL programs in a basement. However, many current computing stacks are quite old and have many legacy implementations. Although Java/JVM is still at the cutting edge of innovation it's a language and ecosystem that's been around since 1995 (18 years) and C#/.NET is not much younger at 13 years old.

There are many Java and .NET based systems that haven't been touched in over a decade and this presentation explores some of the issues of upgrading, maintaining or replacing them and provides some pointers on solving common problems.