Have you ever taken a shortcut to complete a task, assuring yourself that you would go back and clean it up and do it the right way later when you had the time? In software, this is called “technical debt,” and when it piles up, it can make code hard to read and maintain. Soon enough, the cost to fix these problems can become too high, and coming up with a plan for your team to take action becomes increasingly difficult.

In this talk, we will discuss the different types of technical debt and tips on how to convince other people in the organization of the importance of making regular “minimum payments.” We also cover some creative strategies and analogies to keep in mind to balance out technical maintenance along the other urgent product-focused work, as well as considerations for projects with extensive “accrued interest.”

This is a talk I have given at in-person conferences (Atlanta Code Camp 2021, Devnexus 2022, devopsdays Atlanta 2023), virtual conferences (Big Mountain Data & Dev 2021, Festive Tech Calendar 2021), and local user group meetups (St. Louis Java Users Group, Modern Web ATL). It introduces a definition and explanation of technical debt but also speaks to some of the pain points that it can cause and the ways in which it manifests; it will feel relevant for people who have been in a software development role, but it will also be informative to people new to the concept and help them understand what to look for in the future. This talk will be specially tailored to the PHP-focused audience with content about how my company managed to take its application on out-of-date Laravel and out-of-date PHP versions and create a plan to collaborate to accomplish this feat. This is a standard format lecture talk.