/Tech Debt

On Exactitude in Technical Debt

- Kevlin Henney tl;dr: "Technical debt is not the cost of repaying the debt: it is the cost of owning the debt. These are not the same." It's also not necessarily a negative thing. Kevlin feels the metaphor is commonly misused.

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Tech Debt And The Pragmatic Middle Ground

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: For startups, having enough tech debt is critical. Having "too little is premature optimization". In the early phase of a company, you want tech debt to be heavy, allowing for the company to move quickly. 

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Tech Debt Developer Survey Results 2020 - Impact on Retention

- Umer Mansoor tl;dr: Despite a small sample size, the survey is telling on the impact tech debt has on retention - 50% of developers are likely or very likely to leave their jobs because of debt.

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The Wall Of Technical Debt

- Mathias Verraes tl;dr: "The Wall of Technical Debt is a surface in your office where you visualize your tech debt on sticky notes. It has a profound impact on how we choose to add, reduce, pay back, or ignore debt."

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3 Kinds of Good Tech Debt

- John Thornton tl;dr: Scaffolding - aka building out an app skeleton saves time and creates learning. Hardcoding so you don't have to commit to a design pattern. Not fixing all edge cases due to diminishing returns.

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How To Stop Wasting Engineering Time On Technical Debt

- Alexandre Omeyer tl;dr: A guide on when and how to take on tech debt, and a strategy on how much to take on or pay down. Identify files in your codebase with weak ownership because code ownership is a leading indicator of your codebase's health.

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TechnicalDebt

- Martin Fowler tl;dr: Shortcomings found in internal code quality make it harder to "extend a system further" without paying off tech debt first. The author describes how he decides when to handle debt.

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The Technical Debt Myth

- Karolina Szczur tl;dr: Certain tasks that involve refactoring are incorrectly bucketed under technical debt. The author runs through what does not constitute as technical debt.

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The Zero Bug Policy

- Kevin Sookocheff tl;dr: All bugs should be treated equally. Benefits are that it sensitizes the team to having bugs, reduces development time (devs have to re-learn the issue and context of bug which takes time), improves feature estimations, velocity and customer happiness.

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Fix Like No One’s Watching

- Dan Abramov

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