Technical Debt

Have you ever had a bubble gum stuck under your shoe?

It's incredibly annoying.

As soon as it embraces the base of your footwear, it makes it presence felt in every step you take.

You then scrub your feet on the ground with hope but the darn thing doesn't come off.

Some shoes have ridges at the bottom. The gum settles in further and gets comfy in its little abode.

Sadly, manually scraping it off takes time. But you've got places to be, so you carry on.

It eventually slows you down.

You keep looking under your shoe in private corners to see how bad it is.

It stares back at you with contempt. You almost feel that it's humming "Can't touch me".

The final nail in the coffin?

When you step on a carpet.

Because now you've ruined that too.

And now you have to completely stop and make amends.

Yup.

That pretty much sums up what technical debt feels like to me.

The more hot fixes, hardcoding and hasty patches you push to production to make your time-to-market goals, the more tangled, uglier and squishy your codebase becomes.

Scrape it off early.