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):
Problem is that now your boss is just going to say Claude can trace those wires for you.
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.
i had the explaine this to my project manager. how are you going to have all our project completed by the skin of our teeth after mandatory overtime, over and over again, and not convince the client to pay for a refactor, AND not calculate a stacking buffer for project complete times? the tech debt will be paid, he has to choose the terms before it’s chosen for him
Cable porn vs cable gore
Time to get out the old tone generator.
"Technical debt" is a phrase that was invented to explain the phenomenon in a way that bean-counting business bosses could understand: we can do it this way in a way that costs us less today but will incur a debt that will slow us down in the future. It was always an attempt to quantify the concept in a way that we have to think about tradeoffs between our current resources and our future resources.
I'm likely spoilt for this but I will take as much time as I need to do things properly, even the "Urgent" ones.
What's this, a Toy Story rack?
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