3 items tagged “technical-debt”
2023
Tech debt metaphor maximalism (via) I’ve long been a fan of the metaphor of technical debt, because it implies that taking on some debt is OK provided you’re strategic about how much you take on and how quickly you pay it off. Avery Pennarun provides the definitive guide to thinking about technical debt, including an extremely worthwhile explanation of how financial debt works as well.
Every wave of technological innovation has been unleashed by something costly becoming cheap enough to waste. Software production has been too complex and expensive for too long, which has caused us to underproduce software for decades, resulting in immense, society-wide technical debt. This technical debt is about to contract in a dramatic, economy-wide fashion as the cost and complexity of software production collapses, releasing a wave of innovation.
2018
Migrations are both essential and frustratingly frequent as your codebase ages and your business grows: most tools and processes only support about one order of magnitude of growth before becoming ineffective, so rapid growth makes them a way of life. [...] As a result you switch tools a lot, and your ability to migrate to new software can easily become the defining constraint for your overall velocity. [...] Migrations matter because they are usually the only available avenue to make meaningful progress on technical debt.