Insights from my Software Engineering Radio interview with Jonathan Schneider
Introduction
In a recent episode of the Software Engineering Radio podcast, I had the opportunity to interview Jonathan Schneider, a co-founder of Moderne and the creator of OpenRewrite. Our conversation focused on the unique features of OpenRewrite, an automated refactoring tool for software modernization. I’m thankful that Jonathan took the time to participate in this energizing discussion about automated refactoring with OpenRewrite!
Insights
I learned a lot from Jonathan during this interview. Here are some of his key insights:
What is automated refactoring and what are its benefits?
“Automated refactoring is writing software that rewrites other software. Its main benefits are to achieve some modernization in that software, to fix security vulnerabilities, and to ensure a consistent style or fix inconsistencies in codebases.”
How does OpenRewrite ensure the correctness of automated refactoring?
“The correctness really stems from some of the characteristics of that data that we mentioned earlier. It’s when a recipe is able to use the type attribution information that the compiler knows that this info method comes from a particular type that we’re able to make that change. So type attribution is one of the essential elements of correctness in a recipe.”
How does OpenRewrite handle the challenge of code quality issues?
“We’ve been taking those recommendations and then matching them to the recipe catalog, those 2,200 recipes that exist, pre-running them, and when they make change, then we have a signal that there is something to do on the codebase at large.”
Listen
In conclusion, if you’re interested in learning more about automated refactoring with OpenRewrite, I highly recommend that you listen to Jonathan Schneider on Automated Refactoring with OpenRewrite from Software Engineering Radio! You can find it on your favorite podcast player, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or listen to it with this handy podcast player.