I've been thinking lately that "tech debt" is the wrong financial metaphor, especially for the manifestation you're referring to around adding features: the profile of "get something that meets current requirements and then expend a lot making it fit new requirements" is a better match to optionality (with changing requirements (or perhaps more properly the value thereof) playing the role of volatility... I don't think the other greeks have much relevance in the analogy). A software project implicitly has a portfolio of calls on meeting possible future requirements (a complication here is that the strike is in a different currency (effort, perhaps) from the underlying (value of meeting a requirement)), with every change to the software affecting the portfolio.
From this perspective, YAGNI ("You Ain't Gonna Need It"), beloved by lean and agile (different agile methodologies embrace it to differing extents: eXtreme Programming seems to most embrace YAGNI) is shorting vol and can pretty easily turn into the tech equivalent of blindly writing naked calls (the collected premium being faster delivery). (It's also not lost on me that leanness tends to imply shorting vol (cf. the point you've made a few times around JIT supply chains), though it's interesting that Toyota, the early popularizer of lean, built up quite a stockpile of chips...).
I've seen a hypothesis (which makes sense to me or at least flatters my priors) that three design/architectural/implementation techniques which aren't often used tend to preserve the most tech optionality: composing processes from pure functions, modeling state as a fold over a stream of events (aka event sourcing), and decomposition into collaborating independent processes communicating via asynchronous message passing (aka the actor model).
"Yet Another" has been a longstanding (back to the early 1970s) naming convention in Unix culture (which pre-94 was something nearly anyone on the Internet was at least glancingly familiar with). It goes back at least to yacc (...compiler-compiler).
I've been thinking lately that "tech debt" is the wrong financial metaphor, especially for the manifestation you're referring to around adding features: the profile of "get something that meets current requirements and then expend a lot making it fit new requirements" is a better match to optionality (with changing requirements (or perhaps more properly the value thereof) playing the role of volatility... I don't think the other greeks have much relevance in the analogy). A software project implicitly has a portfolio of calls on meeting possible future requirements (a complication here is that the strike is in a different currency (effort, perhaps) from the underlying (value of meeting a requirement)), with every change to the software affecting the portfolio.
From this perspective, YAGNI ("You Ain't Gonna Need It"), beloved by lean and agile (different agile methodologies embrace it to differing extents: eXtreme Programming seems to most embrace YAGNI) is shorting vol and can pretty easily turn into the tech equivalent of blindly writing naked calls (the collected premium being faster delivery). (It's also not lost on me that leanness tends to imply shorting vol (cf. the point you've made a few times around JIT supply chains), though it's interesting that Toyota, the early popularizer of lean, built up quite a stockpile of chips...).
I've seen a hypothesis (which makes sense to me or at least flatters my priors) that three design/architectural/implementation techniques which aren't often used tend to preserve the most tech optionality: composing processes from pure functions, modeling state as a fold over a stream of events (aka event sourcing), and decomposition into collaborating independent processes communicating via asynchronous message passing (aka the actor model).
Hey Byrne, just wanted to let you know this piece is featured in this today:
https://www.libertyrpf.com/p/180-berkshire-incentives-yandex-and
Cheers! 💚 🥃
"Yet Another" has been a longstanding (back to the early 1970s) naming convention in Unix culture (which pre-94 was something nearly anyone on the Internet was at least glancingly familiar with). It goes back at least to yacc (...compiler-compiler).
"rather than license Western inventions, they reinvented them"
Is this a euphemism for copying? Seems like there was quite a lot of that going on..