Nina Zakherenko gave a great talk at PyCon 2015 called Technical Debt - The Monster in Your Closet that you need to watch.

Go ahead, watch it. I'll wait…

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Great! Hope you enjoyed it.

That got me thinking about where the term came from. In 1992 Ward Cunningham said:

Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite… The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation, object-oriented or otherwise.

Technical Debt is a powerful metaphor, Ward gave an in-depth interview exploring the metaphor that is very interesting.

How does Technical Debt affect your work? What are you doing to minimize it?

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