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Show HN: Swimming in Tech Debt

(helpthisbook.com)
157 points loumf | 2 comments | 05 Sep 25 05:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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conartist6 ◴[05 Sep 25 11:51 UTC] No.45137491[source]▶
The swimming analogy is not a strong start. You disavow an obvious and strong analogy to monetary debt right away while dumping us into this strange metaphor that depends on us having an intuition for how you think and feel about swimming, and specifically swimming laps? Instead of setting the stakes high right off the bat you've lowered them and lost my attention with this wandering train of thought that has no clear relationship to the topic you wish to discuss...
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conartist6 ◴[05 Sep 25 14:11 UTC] No.45138824[source]▶
I'm reading a bit more now and you're realizing that your debts are real and cost something all the time so that you will have to pay them. Nothing about swimming explains why this might be, though monetary debt sure does.
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loumf ◴[05 Sep 25 14:17 UTC] No.45138888[source]▶
The analogy I am going for is the water resistance. The debt payment is the burst of momentum you get from pushing off the wall.

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.

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4ndrewl ◴[05 Sep 25 15:28 UTC] No.45139702[source]▶
Isn't that same resistance the thing that enables you to float in the first place though? I don't really swim so don't understand the analogy I'm afraid.

The debt analogy works because you're taking a shortcut that allows you to eg get to market sooner (Vs perhaps not at all).

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1. loumf ◴[05 Sep 25 16:10 UTC] No.45140185[source]▶
For some debt, yes, it starts with a shortcut. I want to talk about other kinds of debt-like problems that have nothing to do with that. Where you did everything right, but the world just changed.
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2. conartist6 ◴[05 Sep 25 17:13 UTC] No.45140961[source]▶
I think most engineers know that doing everything right is reserved for toy problems. In engineering you're always making choices about what problems to deal with today and which to leave for tomorrow. Code is always some kind of simplification of reality: reality is just too damn complicated. The rules of the game of tech debt are the same as the rules of thermodynamics and the game of being alive: you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't even stop playing the game.