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157 points loumf | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.215s | source

This is the first half of my book, “Swimming in Tech Debt”. It is available at a pre-launch sale price of $0.99 (https://loufranco.com/tech-debt-book).

I have been working on it since January 2024. It is based on some posts in my blog, but expands on my ideas quite a bit.

In September 2024, excerpts appeared in Gergely Orosz’s Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, which helped me get a lot of feedback that expanded the book from my initial idea. This half is about what I expected to do before that —- the rest of the book goes into team and CTO practices.

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The chapter titles are too long, and the contents of each are too anecdotal.

That means I can't find an interesting chapter, and just blindly picking one leaves me with a stream of consciousness to sort through.

I don't get the sense that this is coherent enough to be the book or guide people expect. It really does feel like a collection of loose blog posts. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you change how this is presented.

If you want to tell stories that's fine, but don't then organize this as if each chapter is a lesson. That's misleading because there's not enough conceptual meat on the bones there. Organize the chapters by the stories you want to tell, not by the concepts you hope the reader sees in them.

Distilling and organizing the knowledge you think you have in your blog posts would mean an entire rewrite of this book and more careful analysis than just labeling each as its own chapter and adding a few sentences to fill gaps. The book people want would probably be 10% narrative and 90% instructional. This is 100% narrative in its current form.

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