Technical Debts: how to build without owing

Technical Debts: How to build without owing.

What is technical debt?

It’s the debt owed by technical decisions while crafting softwares. To solve a problem by creating more problems. Problems in software are debts that a software engineer is unable to pay.

To understand technical debt, hardware best explains. Hardware is the foundation of software. There must be no technical debt when building hardwares. CPU is the most extreme example of building hardware. CPU is the brain of hardware. The brain must not contain any defects. Such defects when they happen in the brain can cause catastrophic failures to the whole system from other parts of the hardware to software: https://www.zdnet.com/pictures/all-the-major-intel-vulnerabilities/. The names of the top of the major vulnerabilities show how catastrophic they cause: Meltdown, Fallout. Meltdown means total systemic failure. Fallout means apocalyptic failure. It explains why it takes a lot of time to craft CPUs: to assure no vulnerabilities. No technical debt. Debts owed by hardware are also extremely hard to pay. Fixing with BIOS (the software that manages the hardware: firmware) is a workaround. The only way to fix a CPU that couldn’t apply any workaround is replacing it with a cured CPU. Hardware replacement is the final solution that costs a lot of resources. There must not be any technical debt in hardware.

Software is the greatest invention in technology. The greatest attribute of software is flexibility. Flexibility conveys elasticity. Elasticity means it can be changed at any giving time. Anything can be changed, but software changes the fastest. It also explains how software impacts digital transformation: everything built with or on top of software changes immediately and immensely. This flexibility has a flaw: people building software knowing this flexibility allows them to deploy with defects in production. “This can be fixed later when we have time”. We never know “when” when it doesn’t have an exact date time. We never have time when time is not reserved. It will stay there as long as it can until it causes problems. Problems do not motivate action when it’s not severe enough. If a leader is not aware of the problem, he will be put in crisis mode when the system begins to melt down. The organization is in crisis.

A systemic fallout happens when technical debts reach a critical mass. The limit break.

Critical mass is an unmeasurable number, reached at an unpredictable point in time. Only measurable when it happens. When critical mass happens: one prevails the battle losing least, one awakes to infinity and beyond, one grips the meta or total annihilation fallout, apocalypse, doomsday, evolutionary failure. The mass effect.

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong - Murphy's law.

To avoid total annihilation is to avoid owing technical debts.

To not owe technical debt, always craft with care. Carefulness helps identify potential problems that can be caused by technical debts. When one crafts with care, one needs a lot of time to simulate and experiment fallout scenarios. Points of failures. Carefulness helps create solutions: better approaches, backup plans, redundancies, failover setups, crisis handling plans. How much of each of these and how many of these solutions best measure care. The best artisan crafts with care creates null defects - it doesn’t exist. Nothing is owed. Nothing to be paid for. No crisis situation. Nothing is urgent. Never emergency. It creates reliability, stability, and sustainability.

One manages crisis. One obtains longevity.

At Papaya, we call ourselves artisans. We craft with care to provide care ❤️.