Coding Horror: Paying Down Your Technical Debt
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001230.html

Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future.

Interesting!

Invest in technical debts that may never come due.

In a startup, we should take full advantage of our options, even if they feel dirty or riddled with technical debt. Those moralizing feelings are not always reliable. In particular, try these three things: Invest in technical debts that may never come due. The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants. This is a sad outcome which we should work very hard to avoid

bpettichord thoughtful discussion of the pros & cons of technical debt. http://bit.ly/tDjuI #yam http://twitter.com/bpettichord/status/3111092688

technical debt

Analysis of when and why having bad / no tech design does / doesn't pay. Basically it's a metaphor for thinking about how and why we make tech design decisions.

The focus is technical documentations, but the style rules are applicable to all web writing.

Expression usage guide for iPod etc.

The 2008 edition.

"The Apple Publications Style Guide provides editorial guidelines for text in Apple instructional publications, technical documentation, reference information, training programs, and the software user interface." Useful for third party developers as well, especially when you need to reference to some kind of unit/hardware that involves Apple.

Apple publications style guide

Apple's in-house style and usage guide.

=850*77.1

"Computers are supposed to be pretty good at this math stuff. What gives? How is it possible to produce such blatantly incorrect results from seemingly trivial calculations? Should we even be trusting our computers to do math at all?"

"Computers are awesome, yes, but they aren't infinite.. yet. So any prospects of storing any infinitely repeating number on them are dim at best. The best we can do is work with approximations at varying levels of precision that are "good enough", where "good enough" depends on what you're doing, and how you're doing it. And it's complicated to get right."

For Micro Workers