Maintainable

Robby Russell — who also created Oh My Zsh, the wildly popular terminal framework used by millions of developers — hosts Maintainable with a focus on a question that every engineer eventually faces: how do you keep software healthy over time? Since 2019, the show has published 223 episodes featuring senior engineers, architects, and CTOs sharing how they deal with technical debt, legacy codebases, and the organizational challenges that make software hard to maintain. The format is conversational interviews that run about 30 to 45 minutes, released every two weeks. Recent topics have included using AI for incremental maintenance rather than full rewrites, fast feedback loops and observability, database architecture decisions that pay off years later, dependency management strategies, and why code consistency is ultimately a cultural problem rather than a tooling problem. Russell's guests bring real war stories from long-running production systems, not theoretical best practices. What makes Maintainable stand out is its narrow but deeply relevant focus. Most software podcasts celebrate the excitement of building new things, but this show tackles the less glamorous reality that most engineers spend their time working on existing systems. The show has a perfect 5.0 star rating from 32 reviews on Apple Podcasts, with listeners noting that nearly every episode maps directly to challenges they have faced in their own work. If you have ever inherited a codebase and wondered how to make it better without burning it down, this podcast is for you.