Given at BarcampMilwaukee5 on Oct. 2, 2010, Whil Hentzen leads a very frank discussion of what it takes to take on other people's software babies.

There are tens of thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of legacy applications out there, ranging from Cobol to FoxPro for DOS to Microsoft Access to Paradox to Advanced Revelation. Maybe even a couple Visual Basic 6 systems. Unfortunately, there aren't tens or hundreds of thousands of legacy developers to maintain those applications. Most likely, the original developer of the application you're now looking at is long gone. The application is â potentially â now yours. But this situation is fraught with peril. You want to avoid that peril, don't you? Fifty one tips and tricks, ranging from pedantic, overbearing and over-generalized philosophical rants to detailed examples using software you've never heard of, that will help you get through yet another night of dealing with The App From Hell that got dumped on your lap just before you were headed out for a week's vacation. Or something like that.

Audio was taken by the Zoom Handy Recorder H2 in Session Room 1 at Bucketworks. I trimmed, normalized and compressed it, then uploaded it to the mighty Archive.org. You can also download an MP3 file if you’d like. (And for our freedom loving friends, enjoy an Ogg file.)

Crossposted Manually from Writelarge.com.