"Just Enough Software Architecture" author and Google Software Engineer George Fairbanks joins us for a round and educates us on technical debt and how it's a natural part of the software development process. He also gives practical advice on dealing with technical debt and the philosophies that have changed along with the evolution of software architecture.

Defining technical debt with George Fairbanks

We dig into a topic written about by Eric Norlin or SK ventures about technical debt and AI. In this episode, we discuss the consequences of generative AI could be radically transforming the way in which we generate code and deal with code that has been generated in technical debt. 

We explore some fascinating concepts about how fast we can iterate, how we change the dynamics of building software, building automation, and the expertise required to architect systems. This leads pretty far down in the path towards disruptive thinking, and how this could reshape the entire industry.

Source: https://skventures.substack.com/p/societys-technical-debt-and-softwares
Transcript: https://otter.ai/u/MEtVkoNnZeCu0JHa30-jPOcRrj4?utm_source=copy_url
Image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/piggy-bank-beside-a-flower-4886900/

AI And Technical Debt

There's always a day of reckoning. Make yours more manageable (and survivable) by being incremental in paying down your accumulated technical debt. Your technical debt wasn't created in a day... and you shouldn't expect to cancel it in one fell swoop.

Technical Debt

This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Dunstin Thostenson about techniques to recognise and tackle technical debt.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4e5v37w 

Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies:
www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter

Upcoming Events:

InfoQ Dev Summit Munich (Sept 26-27, 2024)
Practical learnings from senior software practitioners navigating Generative AI, security, modern web applications, and more.
devsummit.infoq.com/conference/munich2024

QCon San Francisco (November 18-22, 2024)
Get practical inspiration and best practices on emerging software trends directly from senior software developers at early adopter companies.
qconsf.com/

QCon London (April 7-9, 2025)
Discover new ideas and insights from senior practitioners driving change and innovation in software development.
qconlondon.com/

The InfoQ Podcasts:
Weekly inspiration to drive innovation and build great teams from senior software leaders. Listen to all our podcasts and read interview transcripts:

- The InfoQ Podcast www.infoq.com/podcasts/
- Engineering Culture Podcast by InfoQ www.infoq.com/podcasts/#engineering_culture
- Generally AI

Follow InfoQ:
- Mastodon: techhub.social/@infoq
- Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq
- Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8
- Instagram: @infoqdotcom
- Youtube: www.youtube.com/infoq

Write for InfoQ:
Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development.
- Join a community of experts.
- Increase your visibility.
- Grow your career.
www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

InfoQ Podcast

Transcript

Techniques to Tackle Technical Debt with Dustin Thostenson

This week, Bank of America’s Ashok Krishnan and Duncan McInnes join Tony to discuss the build, buy, borrow strategy and instilling the right culture within the bank.

0:00 – Shen and Tony talk about the Risk Live Asia 2025 conference in Singapore
7:30 – Ashok and Duncan join the podcast
11:30 – The build, buy, borrow strategy
14:00 – Building a rocket ship
19:00 – Instilling a culture that remains
22:30 – Doubling down on the ‘Why’
28:00 – Managing tech priorities
34:00 – Dealing with data, interoperability, and tech debt

Episode 334: BofA’s Krishnan and McInnes

In this episode, I talk with Dave Lewis, global security advocate at Akamai. We talk about how technical sprawl and employee churn compounds security debt, the tenacity of solvable security problems, and how the speed of innovation reintroduces vulnerabilities.

Dave Lewis on the Tenacity of Solvable Security Problems

In this interview Agile Alliance Board Member Declan Whelan makes the case for reframing Technical Debt and having organizations develop practices and programs supporting Technical Health. During the interview we discuss what technical debt it, how our perception of it has evolved and why taking a more positive and proactive stance for it can be so beneficial for organizations that are trying to improve flow and remain competitive in the marketplace.

Declan also shares details on the Agile Alliance’s OnAgile 2017 virtual conference which is taking place on October 25, 2017.

SHOW NOTES

00:09 Interview Begins
00:36 Background on Declan
02:35 What is Technical Debt?
03:55 How the definition of Technical Debt has evolved
05:11 Impediments to flow
06:15 Why it makes sense to think of Technical Debt as Technical Health
09:42 How does technical debt happen?
11:15 The environment (or system) may be set up to support increased technical debt
13:12 Explaining to management why technical wellness is so important
14:26 Measuring technical health (and debt)
15:58 Explaining the debt in dollars and showing the value of investing in technical health
16:22 How much faster could you go?
17:25 Why Declan enjoys legacy code and why some folks get frustrated with it
19:00 Finding the right people to work on it
20:16 Should technical debt go in the Product Backlog?
20:55 Employing the Boy Scout rule
24:25 Does Leadership and the PMO understand the importance of dealing with technical debt?
26:00 How the PMO can have a positive impact on technical wellness
30:55 OnAgile 2017 - the Online Conference (10/25)
30:04 What is Psychlomatic Complexity?
34:16 The things in Agile that Declan is focusing on learning about 
36:00 Contacting Declan

OnAgile 2017 http://bit.ly/2i3G0f6

CONTACTING DECLAN
Leanintuit http://leanintuit.com
Twitter https://twitter.com/dwhelan
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/declanwhelan/
Agile Alliance https://www.agilealliance.org/

Declan Whelan  - Technical Health

Engineers are very familiar with the term technical debt—but what about design debt? Lou talks with Audrey Crane, Partner at DesignMap, about why, if you’re always learning, design debt is a good and necessary thing.

Follow Audrey Crane on Twitter: https://twitter.com/audcrane
Joins us at the 2018 DesignOps Summit: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2018

Design Debt: A Chat with DesignMap’s Audrey Crane

Host Kevin Greene and guest Brian Knapp, industry renowned software developer discuss the importance of software engineering in modern software development. Brian discuss the need for “minimalism” in software development to help reduce technical debt, complexity and size of today’s software.   Brian shares his thoughts on how organizations approach software development to improve software quality and security.

Interview with Brian Knapp (Part 1)

In this podcast, Daniel Bryant spoke to Michelle Krejci, service engineer lead at Pantheon, about the Drupal and Wordpress webops-based company’s move to a microservices architecture. Michelle is a well-known conference speaker in the space of technical leadership and continuous integration, and she shared her lessons learned over the past four years of the migration.

Why listen to this podcast:

 - The backend for the Pantheon webops platform began as a Python-based monolith with a Cassandra data store. This architecture choice initially enabled rapid feature development as the company searched for product/market fit. However, as the company found success and began scaling their engineering teams, the ability to add new functionality rapidly to the monolith became challenging.
 - Conceptual debt and technical debt greatly impact the ability to add new features to an application. Moving to microservices does not eliminate either of these forms of debt, but use of this architectural pattern can make it easier to identify and manage the debt, for example by creating well-defined APIs and boundaries between modules.
 - Technical debt -- and the associated engineering toil -- is real debt, with a dollar value, and should be tracked and made visible to everyone.
Establishing “quick wins” during the early stages of the migration towards microservices was essential. Building new business-focused services using asynchronous “fire and forget” event-driven integrations with the monolith helped greatly with this goal.
 - Using containers and Kubernetes provided the foundations for rapidly deploying, releasing, and rolling back new versions of a service. Running multiple Kubernetes namespaces also allowed engineers to clone the production namespace and environment (without data) and perform development and testing within an individually owned sandboxed namespace.
 - Using the Apollo GraphQL platform allowed schema-first development. Frontend and backend teams collaborated on creating a GraphQL schema, and then individually built their respective services using this as a contract. Using GraphQL also allowed easy mocking during development. Creating backward compatible schema allowed the deployment and release of functionality to be decoupled.

Michelle Krejci on Moving to Microservices: Visualising Technical Debt, Kubernetes, and GraphQL

Lou Rosenfeld talks with a LOT of brilliant, interesting changemakers in the UX world and beyond. Subscribe to the Rosenfeld Media podcast for a bird's eye view into what shifts UX faces, and how individuals and teams can respond in ways that drive success.

A podcast about Agile and Project Management

Cybersecurity Thought Leader Kevin Greene, explores the latest news and developments in cybersecurity and information assurance on his debut podcast, "Cybersecurity Insights & Perspectives”... Follow him at @iamkevtorious

Wei-Shen Wong and Anthony Malakian discuss the hottest financial technology topics in the capital markets every week.

Software engineers, architects and team leads have found inspiration to drive change and innovation in their team by listening to the weekly InfoQ Podcast. They have received essential information that helped them validate their software development map. We have achieved that by interviewing some of the top CTOs, engineers and technology directors from companies like Uber, Netflix and more. Over 1,200,000 downloads in the last 3 years.

Software engineers, architects and team leads have found inspiration to build better, high performing teams by listening to the weekly InfoQ Podcast. We have achieved that by interviewing some of the top CTOs, engineers and technology directors from companies like Uber, Netflix and more. Over 500,000 downloads in the last 3 years.

An excellent source for industry thought leadership in Edge Computing, Cloud Computing, DevOps, Open Source base on discussions at.the2030.cloud

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.

Husband, Father, Higher Ed Exec, Musician, Developer, Writer, Podcaster, Bon Vivant

Coding Over Cocktails is created by TORO Cloud, a company that offers a low-code, API centric platform for application development & integration.

This podcast series will tackle issues faced by enterprises as they manage the process of digital transformation, application integration, low-code application development, data management, and business process automation.

Watch out for exciting and engaging content from guests who will touch on topics such as APIs as the center and foundation of applications, integrations, and business processes.

Popular tracks tagged #technical debt