Technology Debt

This morning I was up skiing at Snowbird and it was rather cold. I had a friend coming up to meet me and so I stopped in one of the lodges to warm up and wait a bit. There was someone working on her laptop computer and it looked like she was writing code. I can't be sure that is what she was really doing as I try not to be one of those nosy people that reads other people's computer screens. However it got me excited to do some coding of my own.

One of the things that is fought in a high-tech job is that of technical debt. Sometimes we spend so much of our career specializing in one technology or another and ignore new ones coming out. If we do it too long then our own skills become irrelevant. That is why it is good to periodically look at one's technical skills to see if they should be enhanced.

I used to have a developer on my team that would never create a second version of any software he wrote with the same technology. Instead he would look at other computer languages and see if it could be done faster with fewer lines of code or in a more efficient manner. That can be a bit drastic, but constantly looking for better ways to do things is something we should all strive towards.

Seeing someone coding at the ski resort got me excited about the coming year and the new projects I will be working on for my job as well as my personal edification. It also has me focused on my own technical debt and what I can do to move forward with the industry so I don't get left behind. Nobody likes being left behind, especially me.