loumf

But, then where would you host your website?

Looking at your source, I was introduced to Odin -- now I want to hear a lot more about that.

My priority is Kindle, then print. Then I will look into other formats. At that point I will have a PDF (that was used for Print) and an epub, so it will primarily be driven by interest.

The best way to be notified by it is to be on my list at loufranco.com or reaching out to me.

Thanks. I hope it’s useful to you

Thanks. That’s my belief as well. I would have loved to come up with a better term.

In the next two parts of the book I try to convince managers to give some autonomous time to engineers to do whatever tech debt projects they think is best. With some constraints and accountability.

Thanks! You can buy it now for a buck. But, if you are waiting for print, that will be about a month later.

Love that book. Also, "A Philosophy of Software Design" by John Ousterhout

Agreed. I am pretty sure that they are going to look at it though. I am in close contact with them.

For some debt, yes, it starts with a shortcut. I want to talk about other kinds of debt-like problems that have nothing to do with that. Where you did everything right, but the world just changed.

I find helpthisbook.com to be helpful in getting comments on the book and sharing it. I'll send this feedback to them.

I struggled with this. I didn't have the guts to not use "tech debt" in the title and throughout the book. I wanted to coin a new term, but didn't find anything that worked.

There are parts of the debt analogy that (I think) really hurt getting it dealt with. I think that explaining it like that to non-engineering decision makers will make them think they understand it and then quash projects based on some kind of ROI analysis of debt payments. They'll be happy to have the debt.

I do wish HN had a culture of being ok with linking to supporting material on our own sites. I have been blogging for 20+ years -- some of those posts are relevant (and I think useful).

I also mostly write for myself, but I want to get more of it out there because I think it's useful.

No worries at all. I really do appreciate constructive feedback. I put every draft of the book out there that I could, and this is my best version of making the book I wanted to make that resonated with at least some people.

I totally get that it's not for everyone.

This is why I shared half the book. I will probably continue to do so for at least a few months (even after the book is launched). I am sharing a lot of the content of the next six chapters on my email list and will probably always have that archived for them.

I really don't want people to buy it if they won't like it.

Thanks! I put up half the book so that only people that liked it would buy it. I am ok with it not being for everyone. I got about 70 sales overnight, so I am totally fine with some negative comments as well. Most are constructive.

I am a little miffed that someone called it AI slop. I wrote every word (with professional editors helping). So, that hurts a little :)

The analogy I am going for is the water resistance. The debt payment is the burst of momentum you get from pushing off the wall.

I think of tech debt as something you are dealing with all of the time and something inevitable.

I don't like the financial analogy because it implies that you "took out a loan" by taking a short-cut, and that you are obligated to pay it. There is definitely some of that, but mostly, I see it as good decisions that didn't age well. And also, that you may be ok with living with it.

If you are interested, my writing group is doing a free, 6-week (1-hour on Thursday) accountability group sprint. We spend most of the time writing (quick chat at the beginning and end)

https://pages.usefulbooks.com/writing-sprint-2025

I started writing the book in Obsidian, but realized I needed something a little better. So, I took it to Scrivener, which is where the first draft was completely developed (it can maintain references and a TOC somewhat).

But once I needed editors, it had to be in Word and all of the references needed to be rebuilt when that was completed. It's now in a contractor's hands, using some book making software (not even sure which, I think an Adobe product).

So, yeah.

There will be a print book about a month after the Kindle version launches. It takes time to get the formatted properly (using a contractor). It will be offered for the Amazon minimum price to start -- if you want a notification, sign up on my site: https://loufranco.com/tech-debt-book.

No problem. I hope you find some useful tips in it.

Thanks for the feedback. The reason that I put up half the book and offered it for $1 to start was to make sure that people that didn't like it wouldn't buy it.

I struggled with this opening and it definitely could have been better.

It was not AI written. I took 18 months to write it. I documented a lot of that on my blog in real time and in LinkedIn. I have posted several drafts of (hopefully) increasing quality publicly.

I get that you might not like my writing, but it is mine.

I did submit as ShowHN. I don’t know how and when this got edited.

Sorry to hear that. Fair.

I will give this feedback to the helpthisbook people. I am sure they will appreciate it.

I did not use AI to write this. I paid professional editors to help me get it polished. There were 4 rounds with 5 different people. I also got lots of grammar/typo comments using helpthisbook (hundreds of readers pointing out errors).

I did (very rarely) take single sentences to ChatGPT and ask it for the correct way to punctuate it.

I personally have always used em-dashes, perhaps incorrectly. I actually tried to learn the correct usage and stick to using it when appropriate. One of my goals in writing this book was to become a better writer, which I could only do (IMO) by writing and getting editors to help me.

You should do this for apps even if you trust them.

One issue with permissions is that they apply to the entire app, including any third-party dependencies. Lots of apps use libraries given to them by advertising services -- they notoriously exploit permissions given to the app.

Because when you quote someone, you should credit them. It's not believable that they don't know the source of the quote because it's trivial to find.

The proposal is directed at the websites in the browser (using JS, embedded images or whatever), not the code that implements the browser.

Yes. I worked there. But it’s described in the API