> A former colleague of mine had a good way to describe it: technical debt is like financial debt, too much will kill you but if you don’t have any you will be

> A former colleague of mine had a good way to describe it: technical debt is like financial debt, too much will kill you but if you don’t have any you will be outgunned by those that do. Yeah, this is a very astute observation. It's also worth noting that the cost of technical debt is higher for larger organizations. Refactoring is very cheap when you're just one or a few people, but prohibitively expensive to the point of impossible when working in a much larger organization. I think it's generally a bad idea to write code to large-organization standards when you're working alone. It makes your process much more rigid than it needs to be. The great benefit of flying solo or with a small team is exactly how nimble you can be, the small cost of re-writes and even throwing stuff away.