Transcript
A (0:00)
Foreign.
B (0:09)
Welcome to the devex Evolved podcast, where we talk about all things developer experience. My name is Chuck Lafferty, and I'm here with my co host, Tim Downey. And today's topic is Technical debt is not bad. Hey, Tim, how you doing today?
A (0:22)
I'm doing really great today, Chuck. Thanks for asking. Let's get right into it today. I. I understand that you've got some hot takes on. On tech debt, Chuck. Oh, tell us what you think.
B (0:31)
Oh, oh, I have. I have the takes. First of all, we call we. I'm big into the. The words mean things, Tim. You know that words mean things. And so whenever you say the word debt, it makes it feel like it's a bad thing. And, you know, the hail. The podcast today is tech debt is not bad. This is not a bad thing. This is a normal thing. This is. This is. You have to maintain your code so you're not making yourself into debt. What a team is doing when we talk about technical debt is they are making the choices at the time with the skill level of the people that they have. So there is no. You know, this is another controversial point. I don't believe there's anything called bad code. Like, there is code, and code can be improved or it can stay the way it is. There could be code that's very simple and elegant and works great and no one wants to touch it. And then there could be code to become very abstract and complex and no one understands it. What is. What is the debt? There both can be considered debt because one might not be future proof, while the other one might be easy enough to understand for the next person to pick it up.
A (1:42)
So what?
B (1:43)
So I'm gonna. I'm gonna wrap up my little pedestal right now, Tim, with this. I actually don't call technical debt technical debt. I call it innovation. And what that does to some people's minds is it flips it around and they go, okay, we're not solving our maintenance problems or trying to keep our code up to date. What we're doing is we're innovating. We're innovating on our code and the processes that get our code to production. And we're going to add these to our backlogs to be a part of our process. And when we have to get around to doing these things, when it's. When it's bubbled up enough that we have to fix something, we're going to innovate on it, and that creates a different type of culture around that. I'd love to get your Take on this, Tim, what are your thoughts on technical debt and where do you think it stands with what I just mentioned?
A (2:33)
Well, I think first a number of folks listening might disagree that there's such a thing as bad code. That's fine. They can, I think you're taking a very generous, generous view on code. But, but you know, as you were saying that and you know, maybe that's something we can kind of think about as we sort of thread through the rest of the conversation today. When you mentioned spinning it around, some thoughts came to my mind around is it really more like tech equity? Right. You know, and so when you, when you've got a mortgage on your house and you've got your house, you know you can borrow against the equity, right? And if you borrow too much money against the equity, you can get into trouble. And you know, so as you speak towards like there's, you know, there's the innovation aspect of this and we think about later maybe as we speak in terms of measurement of this stuff, is it really about equity in the sense that if you sort of exhaust your equity, that's when you get into trouble on things, right. You know, you, everybody can and probably should absorb a certain amount of, it's good enough for now, right, when they're writing their code versus making everything perfect. But you can eventually maybe reach a place where, you know, you basically had a little bit too much risk, right? Like you're over leveraged. Does that, is that kind of what you mean? Does that make sense?
