The Three Letters that Saved My Tech Debt
(The following is a copy-paste of a blog published August 20th, 2015 on the www.box.com blog, which has subsequently been permanently archived) An Inconvenient Debt Talk to any engineer, and they're probably more familiar than they'd like with technical debt. It's a reality in each of our systems about which most of us are aware, but don't like facing. Good practices for addressing technical debt are not discussed often enough. Read on to learn some of Box's story. This article is a continuation of a lightning talk I recently did at Velocity Santa Clara (links here for the video and the slides ). Defining Tech Debt Technical debt can be thought of as the result of any conscious or unconscious design choice invalidated by changes in scale or usage patterns over time. In simpler terms, it's a price paid in software, hardware, network, etc. architecture due to a decision made in the past. In my opinion, tech debt represents solutions which are no longer optimal.