Hi, I’m Gerald Benischke and I’m a software engineering consultant. But don’t worry about the consultant bit!
Through my company Software Design Systems Ltd, I’ve worked with Ooredoo FinTech, Equal Experts, HMRC, MoneySuperMarket, Barclays, MBNA and others spanning nearly 30 years of engineering in the public, financial and telecoms sectors.
I tend to describe myself as both an Agile Fundamentalist and an AppSec Snooper. What does this mean? My software development experience has led me to think that the principles of the agile manifesto form the basis of good practices. It boils down to lots of common sense, small steps, learning along the way, not writing code that nobody will want or need and taking processes and procedures with a pinch of salt.
As an AppSec Snooper, I have been working to make security more approachable and more pragmatic. You could even say, more agile. The only way to deal with a deluge of supply chain vulnerabilities, bad practices copied from StackOverflow or hallucinated by an LLM is to bring security together with development (this is where the “shift left” buzzword applies).
Aside from Agile and AppSec, I’m interested in middle-tier services, databases, security automation and functional programming. And recently, I've become a head of engineering, where I swapped working with code to working with people. That suits me fine as I've bastardised the 80:20 rule: Software engineering is 80% social and only 20% technical.
"This tech stack is so outdated and oh my goodness just look at the metaphorical gaffer tape that's being used in code" - sound familiar? How about "We can’t recruit for this position, because nobody wants to program this legacy crap anymore"?
Yet how many banks, insurances or government departments would just stop working if the mainframes were switched off.
In this talk I would like to show that far from something that can be outsourced to the lowest bidder, looking after an existing codebase is a job for the most experienced engineers. Far from being "the short straw", brown field development or maintenance is just as - if not more - exciting than working in a feature factory knocking out a few microservices with the current shiny patterns.
To let you into a secret, most of the shiny code that's written today is already legacy…
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