Engineering
Technical Debt
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Learn Technical Debt with the Practica AI Coach
The Practica AI Coach helps you improve in Technical Debt by using your current work challenges as opportunities to improve. The AI Coach will ask you questions, instruct you on concepts and tactics, and give you feedback as you make progress.Common Technical Debt Challenges
These are common challenges people face when gaining expertise in technical debt. Tackling these challenges head-on can help you learn this skill quicker.
I'm a software engineer at a fast-growing startup. As we scale, we are accumulating a lot of tech debt, and it's impacting our development process. How can I prioritize and communicate the importance of addressing tech debt to my team and stakeholders, while still meeting our business goals?I'm an engineering manager at a mid-sized tech company. We have a legacy system that was built many years ago and is now causing significant technical problems. The system is outdated and has become a black box that only a few engineers understand. This creates a dependency on those engineers and makes it difficult to onboard new team members. How can I convince the management to allocate resources to refactor and modernize the legacy system so that we are set up for long-term scalability?Work on your own challenge with the Practica AI CoachCurated Learning Resources
- Towards an understanding of technical debtKellan breaks down five common meanings of the term "technical debt": maintenance work, features of the codebase that resist change, operability choices that resist change, soul-sucking code choices, and dependencies that resist upgrading.
- 3 Kinds of Good Tech DebtJon asserts that tech debt can help projects succeed if taken on intentionally. Scaffolding, hardcoding things, and not fixing all the edge cases are three examples of intentional tech debt.
- A Taxonomy of Tech DebtBill examines different types of tech debt, including: local, macgyver, foundational, and data debt, and evaluates them using impact, fix cost, and contagion as metrics.
- From 15,000 database connections to under 100: DigitalOcean's tale of tech debtSunny details DigitalOcean's largest technical rearchitectue to date.
- Tech DebtGergely explains how to become aware of technical debt, how to keep tech debt to a minimum, and what is the right amount of tech debt to keep.
- Exit the haunted forestJohn leverages his experience from large system rewrites at Google and Stripe to explain how to identify situations with lots of technical debt that call for a rewrite, how to lessen the fear around a rewrite, and how to incrementally work through a rewrite.
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