Ur-Technical Debt

The Rituals of Iterations and Tests

“…I'm not aware of a name for an iterative process with imperfect cleanup across iterations, so I've been calling it a sedimentary process because the old ideas are still there in the code but partially covered in layers of new code. 1 You can cope with the old ideas in code by mentally translating. For example, when you see a data structure still named "motorcycle," you mentally translate that to "car."…”

Code Is Your Partner in Thought

“…Friend: I read your description of what you called ur-technical debt in your last article. 2 You say that technical debt happens when your ideas diverge from the program you are writing. I don't understand how that can happen.…”

“…I like the way the debt metaphor highlights the interest payments. 2 By writing easy-but-confusing code, I'm putting a mental burden on my teammates and myself, a burden that's like an interest payment. The more confusing the code is, the higher our interest payments are on the debt.…”

Building a Kubernetes infrastructure for CERN’s Content Management Systems

“…The increasing divergence between the original and present requirements results in technical debt [2]. The main purpose of this work is to pay back technical debt in CERN's Content Management Systems by modernizing the software architecture and making the service more secure and flexible (see section 4.1).…”

“…So far we haven't found the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler useful, because the traffic on most "standard" QoS websites is too low to warrant multiple pods 2. The server pod's memory needs to satisfy each website's Quality of Service requirements.…”