this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Programmer Humor

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Hey bro, can I have some antibiotic resistance?

Sure bro, but remember that the heavy metal tolerance gene is a dependency.

Shit, I'm on python 2 but hmrA requires python 3.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Now I want to know what "tech debt" means. Could someone please Google for me?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Implementing a software feature takes a certain amount of time, and time translates pretty directly to money. Sometimes, you may need to meet a deadline or run out of budget, so you end up implementing the feature at a lower quality or without completing the usual checks or constructing it in such a way that nothing else can be built on top.

This allows you to meet the time/money constraints, but it will come back to haunt you, either making the implementation of future features more costly, or requiring the mess you left behind to be cleaned up, before trying to build on top.
As such, it feels a lot like you're taking up 'technical debt', which you'll have to pay for later.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It's mostly a software development term. Bugs are the most obvious kind of tech debt. They have to be fixed or a product will slowly become unusable over time, so when you release something with bugs you're incurring "debt" they must be "paid" later by fixing them. A lot of tech debt also involves corner cutting and bad design decisions that are hard to explain briefly.