What is technical debt?
In the best case, technical debt is a deliberate deficiency in your system that you knowingly take on in order to get a feature shipped faster. In the worst case, it is a critical component that you design, write and ship in 4 minutes whilst really super-duper high on a particularly potent brand of Australian glue. In either case, the debt grates away on you and your team and constantly demands “interest” in the form of monkey-patched hotfixes and increased development time. You may one day decide to “pay it off” and refactor away your prudent-tradeoff/hallucinogen-induced-whimsy.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.funkypenguin.co.nz/link/meet-technical-debt/