Show HN: Swimming in Tech Debt (helpthisbook.com)

Congratulations on writing a book and getting it out in the world.

1. It took me two tries to realize there is more than the table of contents and find the Unlabeled links on the left. Just make the text in the TOC clickable.

2. Maybe text navigation didn't work the first time because I did not select the correct option on the popup about interaction. This is a distraction from reading irrespective of what I picked.

3. Advice: make the reading experience work like readers expect. There are conventions. Trying to be clever doesn't benefit your readers...and will annoy at least one of them.

4. Nobody likes popups. Nobody. Nobody.

Good luck.

Thanks for the link. Its always helpful to have new ways to describe tech dept. The term is too overloaded and most people roll their eyes when hearing it since it can be used to describe anything from real issues to things that are fine but you just do not like for whatever reason. Look forward to reading the section on what issues are worth paying down and those that are fine to live with. Its not any easy decision to make, but having concrete examples is always a bonus. For .99 cents pre-ordered a copy and if there is going to be a real book would love to have it sitting on my desk. It could sit next to Software Estimation by Steve McConnell ;) Cheers!

You think it is the first half. You’ll realize later on that really you need a totally different structure to write the book. You’ll try to refactor the whole thing, but some obstinate subset of the original readers will insist on using the original index. In the interest of backwards compatibility, you’ll jam the new structure into the margins (so they can keep their precious index).

It’s text-debt.

Thank you for writing down and sharing your experiences and insights, and making it accessible for just a mere buck.

DNR'ed pretty quickly.

You seem to be writing about other concepts and just redefining them as tech debt.

I left more detail in comments, but if I had purchased this book I would be seeking a refund, because I would be expecting a detailed exploration of technical debt, not just a focus on bad coding practice.

I'd recommend resubmitting as Show HN since this is your product and those submissions actually have their own dedicated URL. Plus, the way the title reads now is as if the submission was a blog you found

This whole thing reads as AI written and doesn't really talk about "tech debt" in any brass tacks way.

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First of all, congratulations

Honest question expecting your honest response. How much of it's written by AI? Recently, I noticed I am liking thoughts of real people over the super structured, emdash-y, zero grammar mistake AI texts.

I want to support authors who share their experiences, rather than guiding AI to write thoughts

The chapter titles are too long, and the contents of each are too anecdotal.

That means I can't find an interesting chapter, and just blindly picking one leaves me with a stream of consciousness to sort through.

I don't get the sense that this is coherent enough to be the book or guide people expect. It really does feel like a collection of loose blog posts. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you change how this is presented.

If you want to tell stories that's fine, but don't then organize this as if each chapter is a lesson. That's misleading because there's not enough conceptual meat on the bones there. Organize the chapters by the stories you want to tell, not by the concepts you hope the reader sees in them.

Distilling and organizing the knowledge you think you have in your blog posts would mean an entire rewrite of this book and more careful analysis than just labeling each as its own chapter and adding a few sentences to fill gaps. The book people want would probably be 10% narrative and 90% instructional. This is 100% narrative in its current form.

I wish you luck, and you’ve picked a good subject.

I once wrote a book (about 400 pages, after editing). No one read it, and rightly so. It covered a topic in a preachy, dictatorial manner. It’s long buried in a deep, unmarked grave, in the desert.

It was accurate, well-written, well-structured, relevant, and useful, but assumed a tone that was pure poison. It was aimed at an audience that did not respond well to the tone.

It was extremely valuable education for me, though. My mother was a scientific editor, and edited the book. It was brutal, and quite humbling, but her work ensured that the book was absolutely perfect. I don’t think I’ve ever shipped anything as close to [unpopular] perfection as that book.

Even though I have never been particularly interested in writing book-length stuff, since then, I continue writing to this day[0]. Here’s the latest thing I did (released a few days ago)[1]. I don’t really write for others; I write for myself.

Good luck.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/

[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/series/passkeys/

[EDITED TO ADD] I typically get some downvotes, when I link to my postings. Long ago, I favorited a comment that I made, explaining this[2]. I don’t expect anyone to actually read it before hitting the down arrow, but I figured that I’d add it here, for elucidation.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860143

It's a good topic and I am currently trying to manage lots of tech debt. So it caught my attention and I started to read, but it seems that you liked your swimming upstream allegory a little bit too much. Basically reading the same sentence several times in every chapter bored me and I quit...

The swimming analogy is not a strong start. You disavow an obvious and strong analogy to monetary debt right away while dumping us into this strange metaphor that depends on us having an intuition for how you think and feel about swimming, and specifically swimming laps? Instead of setting the stakes high right off the bat you've lowered them and lost my attention with this wandering train of thought that has no clear relationship to the topic you wish to discuss...

A total tangent but it's amazing how more palatable "tech enhancement" is in planning, management chats, etc., than anything involving the term "tech debt"

I don’t have time to write a more detailed review just yet, but given all the highly critical comments, I just wanted to put out there that I read quite a bit of this last night and thoroughly enjoyed it!

Anymore, if the first thing I get when I visit a site is some kind of modal popup, I just close the tab. This shit has got to stop.

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Someone has to mention Working Effectively With Legacy Code, by Michael Feathers, still a fantastic book.

https://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-Fe...

I haven't read the book but I've known Lou for probably 20 years and he is a very smart, very pragmatic software engineer who also happens to be a great guy. I look forward to when this is launched so I can buy a copy.

I read the first part and I enjoyed it. I agree that us developers aren't great at communicating tech debt effectively. Managers are also not great at prioritizing it. I think the "debt" analogy has been a net negative as management often thinks "we'll just pay it later" but don't often see how much pain it's causing. So having a resource to help both sides on this topic is very valuable.

Any chance you’re selling the ePub format directly, or via the Kobo store? I switched from Kindle to Kobo a few months back, when Amazon decided to remove everyone’s ability to download the books they’ve purchased. But I’d love to read this!

will check out your blog ! cheers and good luck