Escaping Technical Debt

Wiki is an Hawaiian word meaning quick. Ward Cunningham heard the word in Hawaii and used it to refer to the efficient and open collaborative projects that he was working on in the early 1990s that went on to inspire many projects like Wikipedia.   The wiki provides a way for different people to share their knowledge, to educate one another and to solve problems.  Ward Cunningham also first used a term, “technical debt” to refer to a failure to fully plan for how computer programs would work over time.  Technical debt is the result of “quick and dirty” methods that are incomplete, leaving a debt to be paid in labor in the future.  Ward has given us words to describe both vital problem-solving techniques and a phenomenon that has plagued the tech world as well as American society for many decades.   For our environment today, we all know we  must collaborate to address those old debts and find the most sustainable solutions … quick. We can see our technical debt wreaking havoc globally through business, government and all kinds of organizations.  In light of this, we feature an interview with a tech author named Quinn Norton who has begun using technical…