Top 3: why technical debt is bad, learn Rust by writing an OS and Elizabeth Holmes's daily routine.

Hello my friends.

Last week was scary.

I have relatives in Ukraine and because of the whole situation I was not in the mood to write anything on development. But I'm back on track.

Here's what I picked this week, enjoy!

1. We sound like idiots when we talk about technical debt​

TL;DR: How to explain to your manager why technical debt is bad.

First, you have to answer yourself why this is bad (and “well, it is just bad” answer is not acceptable)

Alright, how do you find the answer?

There’s a fun exercise called 5 whys that every kid in the world plays. The point of this exercise is that it helps you find the answer to some question by repeating the question "Why?"

Let's start:

– Why is tech debt a bad thing?

– Because the code gets complicated.

– Why is this bad?

– Because it takes too long to develop new functionality and the number of bugs is growing.

– Why is it bad?

– …answer…

– …why…

– …answer…

– …why…

– This is bad for the company because it doesn't earn X% of the possible revenue per year.

And here's the answer! Thank you all for your participation.

2. Writing an OS in Rust​

TL;DR: Blog series that teaches you Rust programming language by building a small operating system.

3. Things that used to be hard and are now easy​

TL;DR: Tech things that used to be hard and are now easy.

Here is the hardest things I personally remember:

• centering a div before flexbox
• SSL certificates before Let’s Encrypt
• creating cross-platform applications before Electron
• setting up a development environment before Docker
• setting up cloud infrastructure before Terraform
• supporting IE before it died (thanks to google for chrome and capitalism for the competition 🤝)

🦚 Tweet of the week

Elizabeth Holmes's daily schedule.

Internal Tech Emails @TechEmails Elizabeth Holmes's daily schedule Circa 2005–2009 pic.twitter.com/hhWUBHhpbe December 1st 2021 989 Retweets 8,888 Likes

Looks like a schedule of American Psycho.

For those who slept through the last five years, this is the CEO of the startup called Theranos. They claimed to have invented a revolutionary technology for fast, cheap, and detailed blood analysis. She raised so much money that at its peak the startup was valued at $10 billion. But in the end, it turned out that no claimed technology existed and never had. For such a beautiful scam, Elizabeth was sued.

That's all for this week, take care and have a great one!

– Nick

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