@[email protected]

I’m not active here at the moment. find me at @[email protected]

[@[email protected] @bozoskeleton]

That point in a project where you want to look up the dielectric constant of truck bed liner.

[@[email protected] @bozoskeleton]

@kendeep can you open your DMs? I have a LIWho-related question...

[@[email protected] @bozoskeleton]

@AmyPearlman @kyleejohnson Probably depends on the team/organization/problem/specific desired outcome. And I definitely hear the “too much is another problem” bit.

[@[email protected] @bozoskeleton]

@kyleejohnson @AmyPearlman Also: bureaucracy in <your industry here> is a special kind of problem which is fundamentally unrelated to technical debt. Except that it usually causes more.

[@[email protected] @bozoskeleton]

@kyleejohnson @AmyPearlman One of the first things I do with new teams is see if they’ve got a low-barrier-to-entry way to put together notes. If they do, and they start using that, then as a matter of course you start accumulating documentation. Which again comes back to library science issues :)

[@[email protected] @bozoskeleton]

@AmyPearlman @kyleejohnson The key (IMHO) is to find people outside the team that can be part of the community of understanding. If you can build teams that are willing to donate their time for the betterment of the rest of the institution, you gain resiliency in persisting the community stories.

[@[email protected] @bozoskeleton]

@kyleejohnson @AmyPearlman That’s 100% accurate. The oral account, people understand as part of a community; the story evolves as the community changes. The written word loses context without someone whose job it is to understand how it should be interpreted.

[@[email protected] @bozoskeleton]

@AmyPearlman @kyleejohnson The other piece of the puzzle for me is the renewal cycle. If teams aren’t annually touching technology, they will lose context. We bury that need by deferring maintenance and the cost is accrued technical debt when we lose that context.

[@[email protected] @bozoskeleton]

@AmyPearlman @kyleejohnson Million dollar question right there. My take has been the long slow road - building new communities that support each other and understand cross-team ops/dev in ways that lost context is minimized (not eliminated). That new community building is my choice 10% investment.

[@[email protected] @bozoskeleton]

@AmyPearlman @kyleejohnson If you’re trying to solve a *current* technical debt problem, then documentation may be the right answer - because you're trying to rebuild the lost context in a way that new eyes can regain the context. But again, without a librarian, the docs are likely to only work once…

[@[email protected] @bozoskeleton]

@AmyPearlman @kyleejohnson So, back to my point (thanks cold meds): if you’re trying to solve a *pending* technical debt problem, focusing on the docs is probably the wrong prioritization of resources. Focusing on cross-training/pair programming/other social structures keeps the story in the community.

[@[email protected] @bozoskeleton]

Sad to see Twitter burning because it’s the only social media platform I really grok (or grokked). But my Slytherin nature loves this Reddit sub that’s come out of it. https://t.co/OQUObDSkyd #Schadenfreude #chaoticGood #FAFO

[@[email protected] @bozoskeleton]

@dntlookbehindu I dunno, might be time to call it… I think she’s your daughter.

[@[email protected] @bozoskeleton]

@AmyPearlman I think this is important because of prioritization of tackling actual technical debt - which appears to be neigh on impossible, because of lack of understanding about what technical debt actually is.

[@[email protected] @bozoskeleton]

@AmyPearlman Gotta disagree on a technicality that I think is important. It’s impending technical debt. The people that wrote it haven’t lost context *yet*. As soon as one of them moves on, or enough time passes that they forget, then it’s actual technical debt.

[@[email protected] @bozoskeleton]

@AmyPearlman Cat’s gonna cat.