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>Technical debt happens when you make mistakes like choosing the wrong database or programming language for the task at hand Technical debt mostly means duplic

>Technical debt happens when you make mistakes like choosing the wrong database or programming language for the task at hand Technical debt mostly means duplicated code, tightly coupled code and code that isn't programmed to fail fast. Those things can be impacted by the wrong choice of programming language or database but only indirectly. Most of these things are pretty much unavoidable the first time you write code and you can only fix them once your code is surrounded with tests. >The main issues in the case of technical debt are that the product is running slowly, not scaling well Again, not really. The main issues are that the code gets buggier (owing to it being harder to reason about) and development gets slower.

spinlock 11y ago
That's how I think of technical debt too but I think it's worth considering database choice. When you start building an app, you'll choose postgres or mysql or another easy to get started with db. If you're ever fortunate enough to attract enough users to push beyond what those dbs can handle (or even require you to shard them), I think you've ended up in the relm of technical debt. You took the easy path early on because it let you focus on acquiring customers and then you had to improve it later.
- rejschaap 11y ago
  Assuming the code is well factored and the database access code isn't littered all over your code base. I'm not sure I would consider this technical debt. Also, if Twitter and Facebook started out building their product to be used by millions of users, they would have gotten nowhere. They would have 0 users right now. You can't really say Facebook took the easy path either. They went as far as creating a virtual machine and dialect based on PHP. And who knows what they had to do to get MySQL to scale like that.

3 ms·

>Technical debt happens when you make mistakes like choosing the wrong database or programming language for the task at hand Technical debt mostly means duplic

by crdoconnor 11y ago

spinlock 11y ago
That's how I think of technical debt too but I think it's worth considering database choice. When you start building an app, you'll choose postgres or mysql or another easy to get started with db. If you're ever fortunate enough to attract enough users to push beyond what those dbs can handle (or even require you to shard them), I think you've ended up in the relm of technical debt. You took the easy path early on because it let you focus on acquiring customers and then you had to improve it later.
- rejschaap 11y ago
  Assuming the code is well factored and the database access code isn't littered all over your code base. I'm not sure I would consider this technical debt. Also, if Twitter and Facebook started out building their product to be used by millions of users, they would have gotten nowhere. They would have 0 users right now. You can't really say Facebook took the easy path either. They went as far as creating a virtual machine and dialect based on PHP. And who knows what they had to do to get MySQL to scale like that.