Attack Surface

by Cory Doctorow

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.