Mention technical debt to any normal engineer and they'll look upon you as something the cat dragged in. But is technical debt all bad? The term was coined by Ward Cunningham as a way to talk about complexity and bad code in a way that non-technical people could understand. The compound effect of interest on real-life loans was used to explain how complex, badly written code becomes increasingly harder to develop and maintain.
In this talk I'll explore the debt metaphore in more detail and see if, as in real life, there are ways we can leverage debt in our work without ending up in the software equvivalent of the Luxury Trap.