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  "note": "I've used the term technical debt and people I work with use it as well. I’m not a huge fan of it because I don't think it does a good job clearly communicating the issue. With that said, I’m a bit embarrassed to say I had no idea [Ward Cunningham](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham) coined the term and [the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqeJFYwnkjE) included in this article is an astoundingly clear way to describe it, and **very different** than I've ever heard in two decades in tech.\n\n> Ward is the original inventor of the \"Technical Debt\" term, and it's revealing to hear the sentence in which this metaphor was used the first time (emphases are mine):\n> \n> > If we fail to make the program aligned with what we understand to be the proper way to think about our [...] objects, then we are going to continuously stumble into disagreement, and that would slow us down like paying interest on a loan.\n> \n> Ward describes debt as the natural result of writing code about something we don't have a proper understanding of.\n> \n> He doesn't talk of poor code — which he says accounts for a very minor share of debt.\n> \n> He talks of disagreement between business needs and how the software has been written. \n\nThis brought me back to [Pragmatic Product Management](https://www.pragmaticinstitute.com), and making sure that you really know **the problem** you are trying to solve. If you don't, not only are you likely to create a poor solution, you are also almost certainly going to create technical debt.\n\nFraming this metaphor this way is so much more powerful than how it is typically used.",
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