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Show HN: Swimming in Tech Debt

(helpthisbook.com)
157 points loumf | 1 comments | 05 Sep 25 05:33 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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bee_rider ◴[05 Sep 25 04:17 UTC] No.45134939[source]▶
You think it is the first half. You’ll realize later on that really you need a totally different structure to write the book. You’ll try to refactor the whole thing, but some obstinate subset of the original readers will insist on using the original index. In the interest of backwards compatibility, you’ll jam the new structure into the margins (so they can keep their precious index).

It’s text-debt.

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jampa ◴[05 Sep 25 06:25 UTC] No.45135532[source]▶
As someone who is also writing a book (for the first time), I hate how accurate this is.

I wrote my first draft in 3 months, about 200 pages... Six months later, I haven't delivered a quarter of the book. And I will probably revisit those delivered chapters later.

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1. pryelluw ◴[05 Sep 25 20:53 UTC] No.45143463[source]▶
Try writing other people’s books. As in typing them into the word processor. It really helps speed things up.