Attack Surface

by Cory Doctorow

I even forged the headers, for the same reason that a dollhouse builder paints tiny titles on the spines of the books in the living room—even though no one will ever see them, there’s professional pride in getting the details right.

Openstreetmaps was the fair-trade hippie-granola version of Google Maps,

Why did all the idealists in my life have to be so committed to personally making a difference rather than finding a comfortable place from which to watch the great forces of historic inevitability play out?

A government that would do this to its enemies isn’t going to be careful about who it decides is an enemy. Keeping quiet isn’t any guarantee that you’ll be safe.”

Technology debt is when you cheat a barely functional solution to an important problem early in the development cycle, telling yourself that you’ll revisit your fugly hack later and put something real in its place. But you don’t. So you’re forever walking around with this lurking knowledge that you’ve built a fifty-story skyscraper full of people on top of foundations made out of whatever garbage you had lying around at the time. Technology debt eats away at you, keeps you up at night. The longer you carry the debt, the more interest you have to pay, as you write more code that depends on the eldritch topologies of your hacky module, all of which will break as soon as you fix the original problem. The most common solution to tech debt is defaulting: that is, the whole thing collapses (preferably after the coder responsible has left the company) and someone else has to rebuild in the rubble.