Tech Debt

Hickey drew a distinction between the concepts of simple and easy . Simple is the opposite of complex, where easy is something that’s familiar to us: the term he used to describe the concept of easy that I really liked was at hand .

One of the main reasons legacy modernization projects are hard is because people overvalue the hindsight an existing system offers them.

Decisions motivated by wanting to avoid rewriting code later are usually bad decisions.

Planning too far ahead will lead to conflicts in goals and execution. Going too far too fast can lead to purposely overlooking debt or forgetting to record it. When under heavy pressure, the team might fail to care for debt sooner than later.

Know your technical debt, the understanding and management of which is key for a sustainable architecture. Lack of awareness of technical debt will eventually result in a software product that cannot respond to new feature demands in a cost-effective manner.

If someone’s complaining about legacy systems, that means they’re deep in the weeds about to start the most heinous job in web services.

Dealing with legacy systems is like swimming through maple syrup. No one’s legacy systems are in good shape. They’ve been cobbled and duct-taped together for years. The previous redesign probably entailed a quick

You’ve just described ‘technical debt’ that is not being paid down. It comes from taking shortcuts, which may make sense in the short-term. But like financial debt, the compounding interest costs grow over time. If an organization doesn’t pay down its technical debt, every calorie in the organization can be spent just paying interest, in the form