An excellent article, though I think it should have separated out technical debt as it's own item instead of cramming it under "compound interest" and covering

An excellent article, though I think it should have separated out technical debt as it's own item instead of cramming it under "compound interest" and covering it only briefly. Most of the time I've seen performance be a huge mountain to climb precisely because there is so much technical debt. The system ends up complexity-locked due to the huge resources necessary to pay down the debt, which ironically usually merely increases the unwillingness to do so. In order to address performance well you usually need a system that is understandable, straightforward to modify and extend, and possible to have high confidence in its correctness. Unfortunately, those are often unreasonably high goals for many projects, so performance languishes along with all the other desirable aspects of aokp engineered systems such as robustness, elegance, security, good UX, etc.