Three myths about technical debt

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. A few things about technical debt that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

“It only matters for big sites”

Some debt is a deliberate trade, some is just neglect. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

“Our platform handles it”

Paying a little down each cycle beats a rewrite. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

The short version

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. Three things worth confirming about technical debt before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Paying a little down each cycle beats a rewrite — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.