the.com/technical debt
the interest you pay forever for the shortcut you took on a tuesday.
means the accumulated cost of choosing the quick, messy solution now instead of the slower, cleaner one, which you will pay back later with compounding pain.
from coined in 1992 by programmer ward cunningham, who compared shipping sloppy code to taking out a loan: fine at first, ruinous if you never pay principal.
coinerward cunningham, also invented the wiki
the catchunlike money, interest compounds in developer hours
stealth modeinvisible to users until the system collapses
management trapoften invisible to anyone who can't read code
for instance
knight capital — lost $440 million in 45 minutes from old leftover code, 2012
y2k bug — decades of two-digit year shortcuts cost an estimated $300 billion to fix
boeing 737 max — software patches over hardware limits linked to two fatal crashes