So you get an idea, and it’s an amazing one. You’re inspired to start working on it right away…. But what if someone has already made this? Does this mean your idea is dead?
And so you rush to the interwebs, and prepare to search…. But wait!
Until you’ve made the search to determine originality of your idea, it is simultaneously both dead and alive.
Meow.
I’ve been thinking of technical debt lately, and came to extend some interesting (or at least cute) parallels:
Technical debt doesn’t just accumulate. It incurs interest, in form of dependencies that will break and will then need to be refactored to repay this debt in full.
Perhaps you can also default on technical debt. That’s when things get so much out of hand that you scrap the whole thing and rewrite/rebuild it from scratch. Engineers often love the “let’s rebuild it, for realsies this time!” approach. Having seen some shit, I don’t always disagree.
Finally… you can go technically bankrupt. That’s when you lose it completely, give up, flip the table, and fire up the ol’ QBASIC.
10 PRINT "LOL"
20 GOTO 10
(If that’s you - maybe get help. Maybe from someone like me.)