Tag: systems

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Technical Debt: that escalated quickly

| Whitni Watkins

If you’re not familiar with the term “technical debt”, it’s an analogy coined by Ward Cunningham[1], used to relay what happens when rather than following best practices and standards we take shortcuts on technical projects to have a quick fix. Debt occurs when we take on a long-term burden in order to gain something in the short term. I want to note that inevitably we will always take on some sort of debt, often unknowingly and usually while learning; the phrase “hindsight is 20/20” comes to mind, we see where we went wrong after the fact. There is also inherited technical debt, the bit that you can’t control. In all of my jobs, current and past, I’ve inherited technical debt, this is out of my control, it happens and I still need to learn how to deal with it. This piece aims to give some guidelines and bits I’ve learned…

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Designing & Building for Ourselves

| Whitni Watkins|1 Comment
looking at a red car through a camera lens shown upside down and focused surrounded by a blurred view.

I’m in the throes of designing a new help desk for our department that will serve to triage help tickets for approximately 15,000 employees. This has been a major undertaking, and retaining the confidence that I can get it done has been a major challenge. However, it’s also been a really great exercise in forcing me to be introspective about how I design my own ethics and culture into the system. When we design and build systems for ourselves, we design for what we need, and if you’re like me, you also aim to design for simplicity and the least work possible that still accomplishes your end goal. When I’m designing for myself, I find that I am more willing to let go of a feature I thought I needed because another one will do the job okay, and okay was enough, especially if it means less work for me….

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