What is Technical Debt?

Introduction

As someone who crunches out code, whether moderately or a lot if you’re like me. You must have incurred some technical debt somewhere along the lines.

Development approaches

Technical debt is the term given to a certain programming scenario. Assume you had a project with a target deadline. As the technical lead of the project, you are sometimes faced with two decisions which are:

The long and proper way

Using this approach is the most ideal way of development. Many best practises of development are followed using this way.

Staying Sane among all the craziness (keeping up with technology)

A wiseman’s advice

My dad once told me boy. Yes, literally, “boy” was the nickname he gave me for some reason. He said “you will never be satisfied if you always want to keep up with the latest and greatest gadgets”. He also said that sometimes its ok to be behind schedule a little bit. You see, my thought as a young, gadget addicted teenager was that. “This was some excuse he’d come up with just to have some breathing space from getting me the latest video games”. How naive I was though.

How learning a new programming language can help you become a better programmer?

My Theory

I came into first year at the University of Manchester, with a fair knowledge of programming in Java. I was fully aware that there were people out there who were well versed in other languages and using it to solve real life problems. Even with this knowledge, I did not even bother to look into any other because I hadn’t yet known the importance of learning a new programming language. I was under the impression that Java was all I needed to know. That if I knew it well enough, it could easily solve any problem I wanted to.