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How to explain Technical Debt to your Boss
(feddit.org)
Hey Boss, look here!
I made a magical X-ray app that displays our code as wiring.
Here is the shiny, neat program that Bob wrote 15 years ago, right before he left us:
And here is what it is today, after Tom took it from Bob, and Jane from Tom, and Mick from Jane, and me from him, porting it to roughly four new platforms, and adding about 240 features from customer requests (150 of which were urgent):
As someone who has managed racks, that first picture isn’t usable after day 1.
There’s not place for extra cable length to go.
Zip ties?!? I’d make you cut every one of those out.
Every cable needs to be tied down.
Cable tracing requires cutting.
There’s no service loops.
That’s because this is a broadcast rack (probably for sports) sending SDI over all those cables, notice it’s all BNC not Ethernet. This is probably in a truck that needs to get packed up and shipped to the next game/race/whatever and so doing it all in Velcro with service loops is asking for shit to fall apart on the road for you to find with like a 24 hour timeline until the event
So that’s why shits locked down, it ain’t web server shit
Point still stands, OP is making a poor comparison.
Might be a poor comparison, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad way to present it to thier boss. If the analogy, however flawed, communicates the underlying idea to the listener, then it was effective.
The concept here is very related to why "ceci n'est pas un pipe" is/was compelling.
I'm a developer who occasionally is the 'smart hands' (for our networks team) for some equipment in our office.
Fortunately ours is all Velcro tied so tidily adding an extra cable was awkward but ultimately trivial.
So, please educate a novice who wants to do right: what do you mean by every cable needs to be tied down? You mean individually?
In the 1st photo adding any cable would mean zip tying it down individually.
Thank you. 📺 How To: Leaving Enough Slack In Your Service Loop (Overview & Examples)
Tightly bound cables/wiring is my pet hate. Even if there's room to add stuff it makes tracing anything a nightmare.
I would absolutely prefer to trace something in the second pic.
to me, it matters if its backplane or frontend patchwork. just my 2 cents