mojo - kn

These days, it seems that almost everybody wants to learn to code — and if you believe all the boot camps and book titles that have surfaced over the past two decades, you might think it's also easy to do.

Who's afraid of big bad technical debt?

Every conscientious software engineer knows about technical debt. Lots of us learned the hard and painful way that deferred refactors and sloppy code can and will come back to bite you eventually. Since we don't like being bitten, especially by our own code, we learn to hate that nasty technical debt. All manner of evil gets blamed on it, and we avoid it like the plague. Like some digital bogeyman, we speak its name to scare junior developers into writing good code.

I’ve never been much into buying jewelry. However, even I knew that there was one particular purchase that would warrant careful thought and consideration: the diamond engagement ring for my future-fiancee. The diamond industry is more than happy to accommodate the ignorant, but sincere, purchaser. I quickly learned that, to be an informed diamond shopper, I needed to pay attention to “The 4Cs”—cut, color, clarity, and carat-weight; four properties by which I could evaluate these sparkly carbon crystals. I only used them once, and haven’t needed to evaluate diamond quality in over a decade, but for some reason I still remember those catchy “4Cs.”