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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: 0.2s | 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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giulianob ◴[05 Sep 25 19:48 UTC] No.45142842[source]▶
I read the first part and I enjoyed it. I agree that us developers aren't great at communicating tech debt effectively. Managers are also not great at prioritizing it. I think the "debt" analogy has been a net negative as management often thinks "we'll just pay it later" but don't often see how much pain it's causing. So having a resource to help both sides on this topic is very valuable.
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1. loumf ◴[05 Sep 25 23:40 UTC] No.45145014[source]▶
Thanks. That’s my belief as well. I would have loved to come up with a better term.

In the next two parts of the book I try to convince managers to give some autonomous time to engineers to do whatever tech debt projects they think is best. With some constraints and accountability.