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Engineering

Technical Debt

182 people are learning this skill right now!
Technical Debt is part of our Engineering Career Leveling Framework. Explore next steps in your career from this industry-standard model.

  1. 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 The system is outdated and has become a black box that only a few engineers understand.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?
    Add your own to track your progress and inspire others

  2. Curated Learning Resources

    • Etsy logo
      Towards an understanding of technical debt

      Kellan Elliott-McCrea, CTO, Etsy

      Kellan 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.
    • Squarespace logo
      3 Kinds of Good Tech Debt

      Jon Thornton, Engineering, Squarespace

      Jon 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.
    • Riot Games logo
      A Taxonomy of Tech Debt

      Bill Clark, Engineering Manager, Riot Games

      Bill examines different types of tech debt, including: local, macgyver, foundational, and data debt, and evaluates them using impact, fix cost, and contagion as metrics.
    • DigitalOcean logo
      From 15,000 database connections to under 100: DigitalOcean's tale of tech debt

      Sun-Li Beatteay, Software Engineer II, DigitalOcean

      Sunny details DigitalOcean's largest technical rearchitectue to date.
    • Uber logo
      Tech Debt

      Gergely Orosz, Engineering Manager, Uber

      Gergely 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.
    • Stripe logo
      Exit the haunted forest

      John Millikin, Software Engineer, Stripe

      John 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.