Paying Off Technical Debt
In the past few years we’ve really taken stock of where we are as a company, made countless big diagrams, and all of the different coloured pens have come out. It’s a difficult balance, every tech company grows, innovates, builds new features. But when you build a feature it’s rarely done. You need to deliver features on time for when it is needed, but somewhere along the line a bug will crop up and we’ll patch up that bug. And if it’s a great feature you need to support it forever. When your team is working 100% towards driving the product forward, you’re actually working 0% on revisiting code you’ve written.
We’re at the point where some (not all) of our code is 10 years old, and we need to take stock and review it, upgrade, refactor, throw away everything no one is using, make it better stronger faster. Technology and techniques change and we need to keep up, If you don’t know what Technical Debt is, it’s all the things that you wish you had the time to get around to fixing. It’s that pile of junk in the garage that you wish you had a weekend to sort through. SARD is not alone in taking on Technical Debt, if a tech company tells you they don’t have any they’re probably not being honest.
So, the last few years SARD has invested significantly in levelling up our Battle Gear, we’ve been targeting code, operating systems, databases, frameworks, upgrading, and generally whistling while we work. Last night we upgraded our database cluster for SARD. Did you notice, no? We did it while you were sleeping. We can sleep another time. The next year is going to be a big year for clearing our debt. Our credit rating is going to be through the roof. And we will all reap the benefits of better speed, security, monitoring and better sleep.
That work-life balance thing, yes sleeping better safe in the knowledge all bases are covered are a huge part of that too.
