Article · 20 min read

Paying down tech debt

Gergely Orosz and Lou Franco · The Pragmatic Engineer Freemium Intermediate

Concrete, field-tested advice on deciding which debt to pay and how to justify it. Orosz and Franco share practical rules of thumb for tying rewrite pressure to real jumps in usage or scope, which matches your point about rebuilding under real load rather than on a hunch. It also covers measuring the payoff so cleanup does not become an endless detour.

  • Tie rewrite decisions to real jumps in scale or usage
  • Pick debt to repay based on where it slows real work
  • Measure the impact of cleanup so it stays honest
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It answers 3 questions

  1. We ship fast but our codebase is turning into a mess. How much should a two-person startup care about tech debt?
  2. I built my MVP on no-code but my technical co-founder wants to rewrite it in real code. When is that migration actually worth it?
  3. When is the right moment to stop iterating on the MVP and rebuild it properly, and how do I avoid the second-system rewrite trap?

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  5. If Spolsky tells you not to rewrite from scratch, this gives you the alternative: replace the old thing piece by piece while it... martinfowler.com Article · ~8 min read Strangler Fig Application Martin Fowler
  6. This is the canonical explanation of what a reviewer actually means when they flag your inherited code as risky. Fowler frames... martinfowler.com Essay · About a 10 minute read Technical Debt Martin Fowler
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