technical debt

I recently wrote a post on the Server Check.in blog titled Improving architecture and adding features by containing technical debt. The post shows how the server checking architecture on Server Check.in was improved so it will expand horizontally and scale with new clients over time, and the main theme of that post was how managing technical debt (keeping it low for a small development team) has helped make sure new features and architecture improvements work reliably and simply.

The two main takeaways in the article are:

• Simplicity and stability trumps features.
• Get the architecture right, or die slowly.

I hope you can take the time to read the whole post, and also this excellent explanation of technical debt by Martin Fowler.