Maintaining consistency across a sprawling codebase is one of the hardest challenges in software engineering. Denis Rechkunov, a Principal Software Engineer at Elastic, joins Robby to share how his team turned consistency into a cultural practice rather than a technical checklist. From managing open source projects with hundreds of contributors to experimenting safely with new patterns, Denis believes maintainability begins with shared ownership, not just clean code.
He explains how Elastic introduced automation and linters to improve cohesion without discouraging creativity. Instead of enforcing perfection across the entire system, Denis’ team scopes their changes to manageable areas and rewards steady progress over sweeping rewrites. Their annual “On Week” tradition gives engineers space to fix what frustrates them most, showing how small, focused bursts of work can produce big leaps in stability and morale.
The conversation also explores the human side of maintainability. Denis recalls early lessons about unclear expectations, the importance of documenting decisions in public pull requests, and how open feedback loops build trust across remote teams. Whether it’s stabilizing a flaky CI pipeline or mentoring new engineers, Denis argues that technical excellence thrives when consistency becomes a habit shared by everyone.
Episode Highlights
[00:01:02] Defining Well-Maintained Software
Denis identifies consistency, documentation, testability, and agility as the key ingredients of maintainable systems.
[00:02:22] Balancing Standards and Autonomy
How automation and linters help preserve code cohesion while minimizing interpersonal friction.
[00:04:08] Experimenting Safely
Elastic scopes new patterns to low-risk modules before broader adoption, avoiding mass rewrites.
[00:07:19] Incremental Cleanup
Linters only apply to changed files, helping the team fix issues gradually without overwhelming contributors.
[00:08:02] Maintainability as a People Problem
Denis highlights that sustainable systems depend more on culture and mentorship than on architecture.
[00:10:13] Lessons from Miscommunication
An early experience showed the cost of undocumented conventions and unclear onboarding.
[00:17:09] Making Space for Technical Debt
Elastic’s engineers dedicate part of each sprint and an annual “On Week” to tackle maintenance work.
[00:23:05] Restoring CI Reliability
Denis shares how the team revived a pipeline with only a 10% success rate by categorizing failures and focusing on data.
[00:32:00] Practicing Software Archaeology
He stresses the value of documenting discussions in pull requests to avoid historical guesswork later.
[00:36:09] Feedback and Trust
Open communication, humility, and mutual feedback loops form the backbone of a maintainable culture.
[00:51:00] Embracing Chaos in Open Source
Denis encourages teams to accept a degree of entropy and focus their efforts on user-facing stability.
[01:00:00] Security and Privacy
Why maintainability, trust, and privacy are inseparable pillars of long-term sustainability.
[01:01:06] Where to Start
Instead of rewriting code, start by cultivating maintainability as a shared value across the team.
Resources Mentioned
- Elastic
- golangci-lint
- AppSignal
- The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov — Denis’ recommendation inspired Robby to finally pick up a copy and start reading it himself.
- Denis’s Blog – rdner.de
- Denis on GitHub
- Denis on Mastodon
- Denis on LinkedIn
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