This morning Bijan Sabet had a good blog post on being open and honest about "technical debt".
I think (and commented there) that it's important to get into such debt with your eyes open and plans for how to address it in the future.
If the context isn't clear, what's being talked about here is basically hastily put together technology that accomplishes an early version of what was needed of a product but is considered "debt" because it cannot remain in the state it is in. It is carried as a kind of liability because at some point, either because of new features that are required or it isn't scalable, time and effort will need to be *paid* in order to make it more robust.
Having gone through the process of building multiple software systems from the ground up has clarified for me how technical debt should be planned for. And nothing clarified it for me greater than working on a large project with a hefty amount of inherited technical debt that we successfully cleared off the books, and the monumental effort that it took to do so.
I find it important as you are putting a system together to consciously make the tradeoffs that are necessary and have a plan for how the code (and technology choices) would be iterated and scaled up when the needs arise.
As in monetary debt, this is akin to advising not to take a loan without having a plan for how you're going to pay it back.
Along the way there are also very smart choices you can make to help make that debt less too. Layering and using adaptors being one great example. It can be expensive to retrofit an adaptor model to something that was written assuming it would only have to interact with one particular technology. So abstracting early, even if you are in a hurry, will help you with your later "payment plan" at a fairly low cost up-front.
Another good example is having an MVC model on your UI, which will help later when you need to put an API in place (and reuse the "M" and the "C").
Something to watch out for is piling debt on top of debt (don't charge your mortgage to your credit card!). That is, when the feature comes up that needs to utilize another technology that is in need of repair, instead of making matters worse you should seriously consider at least starting to pay off the debt on the older technology.
The important bottom line is take the debt seriously and don't enter into it lightly. Yes, it's necessary, but have a plan. Things will come up you didn't expect, and you'll suddenly find liabilities where you didn't know they existed. But then you'll be freer to deal with those unexpected things since you're in better shape overall. And your future self will likely thank you for it.
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