Last Friday Site Eng did a Tech Debt Blitz. I was asked to speak for a few minutes at the kickoff for the event. I accepted…and then immediately went into panic mode trying to figure out what I was actually going to talk about. Luckily, Brian Wilcox had my back (thanks, buddy!)
bwilcox sent me a handful of different ideas, but the one that resonated is a piece Mike Rowe wrote about Safety Third. Fair warning: it gets a little “political”…but leaving that aside, I think it’s fairly thought-provoking in our space. In particular, if Site Up & Secure is our #1 priority, and if Craftsmanship is one of the core dimensions along which we gauge talent, then why do we have tech debt at all? And tech debt sufficient to merit an entire day’s worth of “blitzing” it?
Well, the fact of the matter is that we’re all human beings with an imperfect understanding of the present and frankly no fucking clue about the future, and at some point we need to Ship It. “Perfect is the enemy of good”, and if the only thing we ever focused on was Site Up then the end result would be an extremely highly-available Nothing.