What is technology debt?
As we grow our e-commerce and roll out more technology solutions, we sometimes make mistakes in service architecture — we code in a hurry (without caring for code quality and readability) just to see the results of our work faster. Each time we make those compromises, our company takes on so-called technology debt.
On one hand we ship faster or more, but at the cost of certain trade-offs that sooner or later will have to be repaid through:
Technology debt is hard to measure, so it's easy not to realize it exists. It can grow to the point where the company can no longer afford to migrate to a different technology, while the current one has reached its limits and is blocking the company's growth.