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To be clear: I do not think we should actually forget technical debt. Also, this is not the nth post discussing if “debt” is an appropriate metaphor. I do not have a strong opinion regarding the metaphor. My point is rather that I realized in a recent discussion that in the end, it is not so much about technical debt but rather about something else, and I wanted to share the thought.

I wrote a lot about the staggering complexity in IT, its detrimental effects, and what we can and should do about it (see, e.g., my “Simplify!” blog series. I wrote about the embedding of the complexity problem in a bigger context in my “Responsible IT” blog series). I also identified several drivers that usually increase accidental complexity, i.e., complexity in the solution which not needed to…

In the previous post, we discussed several observations, Lisanne Bainbridge made in her much-noticed paper “The ironies of automation”, she published in 1983 and what they mean for the current “white-collar” work automation attempts leveraging LLMs and AI agents based on LLMs, still…

In 1983, Lisanne Bainbridge wrote the much-noticed paper “The ironies of automation”. Being a cognitive psychologist, she discussed some counter-intuitive effects of automation in her paper. She called those effects ironies and paradoxes, providing precise definitions for both terms:

Recently, AWS experienced one of its rare partial outages. Its DynamoDB service experienced a disruption in the US-East-1 region that could be tracked down to a latent race condition in the DynamoDB DNS management system which caused the disruption. A comprehensive post-event summary describing the outage, its cause and the resulting effects can be found here.