Maintainable

Not every messy piece of code needs a refactor. Noémi Ványi, Senior Software Engineer at Xata, joins Robby to discuss how to develop the intuition to know when refactoring is truly necessary and when it’s just unnecessary churn. She shares her approach to balancing pragmatism and maintainability, how product teams and developers can work better together, and why developer autonomy is key to sustainable software.Drawing from her experience working on both open-source and closed-source projects, Noémi reflects on the unique challenges each presents—whether it's dealing with unresponsive GitHub issue reporters, handling unanticipated user behaviors, or navigating large-scale refactors in existing systems. She also shares her philosophy on technical debt: not all of it needs to be paid down, and some of it can actually be strategic.Robby and Noémi also explore the importance of writing meaningful commit messages, the hidden benefits of reviewing open-source pull requests, and why developers should stop waiting fo