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.
I think of tech debt as something you are dealing with all of the time and something inevitable.
I don't like the financial analogy because it implies that you "took out a loan" by taking a short-cut, and that you are obligated to pay it. There is definitely some of that, but mostly, I see it as good decisions that didn't age well. And also, that you may be ok with living with it.
But even then you're also not (yet) getting to the heart of it: what is the value of tech debt? You still make it sounds like a damp rag dragging on you rather than an integral part of an energetic strategy. Money also gives people a clear analogy for why sometimes you want debt -- why and how it can be used as a tool.
In the swimming analogy I would say incurring a debt is like creating a wall that you can burst off of, at the cost of increasing the resistance of the water. Yeah it's a weird analogy. To be more literal, debt buys you the time you need to figure out the optimal direction and especially the critical priorities that will reward work -- will reward investment. It buys time to learn the requirements from experience, and for people to come to some community consensus as to which needs are most imminent. But only if the person managing the debt thinks of it as a tool to be used in this manner.