Every time you ignore an error message and say "I'll worry about that if I see it again", you've added technical debt.
Every time you don't check a function's error return and say "We'll add that after it's all working", you've added technical debt.
Every time a function doesn't work, and you just add a comment that says "This doesn't work" instead of investigating why, you've added technical debt.
Every time you fail to test a function at all, and don't check if it's actually working, you've added technical debt.
Saw all of this tonight... ;)
A lot of people think that technical debt is a function of long term code, of systems that have become weighted down with hacks and patches. Some people think it's a deliberate choice, and therefore you can come back around and clean it up easily enough.
But you can't. It's all lost. You've no idea when that error will pop up again, but it will probably be in front of a customer when you think everything's working. The system will malfunction on Thursdays but you completely forgot that the main interface library that you used had an error return "FAIL_ITS_THURSDAY" that you didn't add a handler for -- now you have to launch a full debug process to find what's wrong (and since you didn't start troubleshooting till Friday, it'll take you a week.) You can't figure out why the system isn't processing fractals because you forgot that the fractal generate function has a tiny little comment that says "// This doesn't work, come back to it later (mb)" - hope you can find it!
Technical debt costs twice what you paid to put it into the system in the first place. And worse, it's often passed on to someone who wasn't there for the original design, so they've never heard of the library that hates Thursdays, only ones that hate Mondays. They'll need three times as long to find the issue. The customer doesn't care that you meant to come back to investigate that error code, they only care that it didn't work. And everyone at E3 was waiting to see your cool new fractal generator, not a grey box that pulses slightly.
Why would you want to deliberately pay all that? Most of the time, the developer of these debts could have fixed them in minutes. Pay the minutes, don't get so caught up in the excitement that you pay the debts later.
