You call it tech debt I call it malpractice

Go Time panelist (and semi-professional unpopular opinion maker) Kris Brandow joins us to discuss his deep-dive on the waterfall paper, his dislike of the “tech debt” analogy, why documentation matters so much & how everything is a distributed system.

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Featuring:

• Kris Brandow – Twitter, GitHub
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website

Show Notes:

• “Waterfall” doesn’t mean what you think it means
• Kris’s Go Time take on the tech debt analogy

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - Let's talk
(00:38) - Moar Go time friends!
(00:58) - Our GopherCon roots
(02:17) - 2nd-gen software engineer
(07:32) - You don't learn through DNA
(10:10) - Always willing to read
(12:53) - Misconceptions of waterfalls
(17:09) - No appetite for rigor
(22:12) - Jerod justifies his nothing
(23:49) - Kris resigns from Go Time?!
(25:52) - Success hides problems
(28:12) - Startups are too slow
(30:02) - The tech debt analogy
(33:42) - Hard to quantify
(40:26) - Documentation matters
(42:24) - Tech malpractice
(51:24) - Auto-Librarian
(54:53) - Librarian tenure
(56:50) - Learning the skillset
(58:58) - The 'why' doc
(1:01:44) - The 'why not' doc
(1:05:05) - Too busy documenting
(1:08:38) - The value of worthless words
(1:11:46) - Change in the last 40 years
(1:16:45) - Announcing KrisOS?
(1:21:22) - What are distributed systems
(1:22:53) - How computers work
(1:26:59) - This is Kris's journey
(1:29:53) - A true full-stack engineer
(1:32:37) - The PCI-e rabbit hole
(1:34:43) - Malpractice is fightin' words
(1:35:25) - The spectrum
(1:35:46) - The malpractice umbrella
(1:37:39) - No time to make a shorter one
(1:38:16) - Coming up next

Episode source