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We don't know the future. Since that's not going to change, we need to stop blaming technical debt on the repercussions of that fact. We want houses before we
by jefb 5y ago
We don't know the future. Since that's not going to change, we need to stop blaming technical debt on the repercussions of that fact.
We want houses before we can save enough money to afford them. We want applications before we know how many users will be slamming our servers. The common denominator here is time. We're trading in time - the only question to ask is whether it's being done for the right reason.
The wrong reasoning is usually something like "it would take too long to understand how to do it better".
When a better solution is understood to have obvious merit but nebulous short term applicability - that's probably good technical debt to take on.
- jahewson 5y ago> We don't know the future Too often when I see this claim it’s used to defend the opposite idea - that we should assume that the future will continue to look like today. A good engineer should be thinking about robustness and flexibility from day one. Many choices we make early on close off options in the future or make them achievable only at great cost and at the expense of other business goals. By this I do not mean “future proofing” or trying to account for all possibilities or to solve for specific scenarios that do not yet exist - those too are traits of an inexperienced engineer.