No, it's just a fucking product you made. The fact it has to be maintained doesn't mean it is "debt", it's just like any other asset.
You don't get to your car and think "that's technical debt". There is nothing technical about it. It's a tool with maintenance needs.
The difference is choosing worse now to get it faster, that's technical debt.
The author navigates the technology world very differently than I do.
The rest of commenters for some reason seem to equate "technical debt" with old technology and "legacy" projects.
We have code running for 10+ years in our CM. It's not technical debt. It's well tested asset that continually produces value without much problems or maintenance, coz most of them were already rooted out.
Sure if it was 10 years old blob in language nobody writes in in company it would have been potential liability but assuming every piece of software is that because it is old is a problem.
They just expect the existing thing to keep working in the background and more imporantly do the new stuff that is wanted.
It's generally a debt, because engineers are not given time to maintain it properly. Imagine the car never getting to go to a garage to be serviced, because it's needed for driving all the time. There is your debt.
Right, but we always do that. We always make some tradeoff to get things shipped faster. And that's fine, otherwise we wouldn't ship things. It's a balance - and the general meta of "all technical debt bad" is harmful to actually building working software.
If you have existing consumers, it's not. Spend that extra 20% making code maintainable or not picking the quickest possible solution. Spend that extra 40% on planning and designing feature that will be in your product for next 5 years
(and even the ones that are pretending to not be here said they don't give a shit)
And replacing obscenities with silly words is just that, silly
> Their are children on this blog.
Putting children on tech blogs is abuse, they might learn something terrible like JS by accident, that's worse than any bad word they could find
If there are still fleshbags who need chair, the one created 20 years ago, if properly cared for, works just fine.
Now, if I used a piece of rotten wood for one leg, because I couldn't bet bothered to go fetch a new plank, this is debt that will need to be paid in the form of putting additional work to fix said leg later.