The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Good tech debt (Interview)

Feb 6, 2020

Jon Thornton, Engineering Manager at Squarespace and author of a popular blog post on "3 Kinds of Good Tech Debt," dives into the nuances of technical debt. He explains how good tech debt, when leveraged correctly, can drive innovation and product development. Jon likens tech debt to financial debt, highlighting the need for strategic, intentional decision-making. He shares real-world analogies, like homeownership, to illustrate the balance between fast feature releases and sustainable code quality, emphasizing the importance of communication and prioritization in managing these challenges.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

ANECDOTE

Squarespace Email Prototype

At Squarespace, Jon Thornton's team used "good tech debt" by building a simple email sending tool.
This allowed them to test core features quickly before investing in a robust email infrastructure.

ADVICE

Managing Tech Debt in Teams

Tech debt discussions should be integrated into regular planning meetings, such as sprint planning.
Design documents and team communication foster awareness about existing tech debt.

ADVICE

Isolating Tech Debt

Isolate tech debt within the system, ideally behind an interface.
This prevents its negative impacts from spreading and allows for better management.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Jon Thornton (Engineering Manager at Squarespace) joined the show to talk about tech debt by way of his post to the Squarespace engineering blog titled “3 Kinds of Good Tech Debt”. We talked through the concept of “good tech debt,” how to leverage it, how to manage it, who’s in charge of it, how it’s similar to ways we leverage financial debt, and how Squarespace uses tech debt to drive product development.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Linode – Our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2019 OR changelog2020. To learn more and get started head to linode.com/changelog.
Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog
Brain Science – For the curious! Brain Science is our new podcast exploring the inner-workings of the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation, mental health, and being human. It’s Brain Science applied — not just how does the brain work, but how do we apply what we know about the brain to transform our lives.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.

Featuring:

Jon Thornton – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

3 Kinds of Good Tech Debt ~> discuss

“Tech debt” is a dirty word in the software engineering world. It’s often said with an air of regret; a past mistake that will eventually need to be atoned for with refactoring.

Head to changelog.com/submit if you’ve written something your fellow devs would find interesting that you’d like us to promote.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!