Taking technical debts consciously
“Choose your technical debt wisely,” your author, Hilliary, says all the time. But what does it mean to choose your technical debt? Aren’t we supposed to be solving problems and identifying solutions?
Yes. But these two things are not mutually exclusive. There’s not likely to be a perfect solution readymade off the shelf. Typically, products are designed with specific use cases in mind, but those use cases are not all-encompassing. No product can cover every permutation of every user’s potential needs and workflows. Indeed, it will be the same for your platform as you progress through its life cycle. When we commit to accepting the shortcomings of a solution or technology, that means we’re committing to compensating for that in another way. Such compensation should be managed so that we don’t create additional overhead or manual workflows that result in unsustainable toil for the platform team or...
