I’ve been noticing a pattern over my 7 years at this org (currently Lead System Test), and it’s killing our velocity.

We use “Technical Debt” as a catch-all for two very different things.

There’s the Intentional Debt (we skipped an abstraction to close a deal), which is fine. That’s a mortgage. We bought the house.

But then there’s the Toxic Debt—the accidental complexity, the god objects, and the flaky tests that we just “retry 3 times” in the pipeline instead of fixing.

The issue is that devs treat the toxic stuff like it’s a strategic decision. They assume they can pay it down later, but the complexity grows faster than they can fix it. Since I’m the one designing the system tests that have to navigate this mess, I’ve started pushing back.

My new rule: If you want to log it as “Debt,” it needs a Repayment Date. If you can’t give me a date, it’s not debt; it’s a defect, and we prioritize it as such.

Does …

I’ve been doing this long enough to remember when half the job was wrestling with browsers, and the other half was pretending jQuery wasn’t holding the whole company together. Things weren’t better, but at least the complexity felt earned.

Now, I keep noticing something weird: the tech keeps getting more powerful, but somehow the day to day work feels more fragile. One team I’m on is obsessed with “faster iteration,” but every attempt to move faster seems to add three new tools, two new layers, and a build system that breaks if you look at it the wrong way. Another team wants to go “AI-first,” but half the time we end up deleting the generated code and rewriting it anyway. You save 10 minutes on boilerplate and spend two hours figuring out why the AI invented an abstraction that shouldn’t exist.

And then there’s the hiring thing. Companies have budgets, they have plans, they have a backlog taller than I am, but the limiting factor isn’t money or ambition …

I’ve recently learned a critical script that populates our database doesn’t do so with UPDATE but rather they first DROP everything then recreate it all + todays new data. When my manager saw my jaw drop he said ‘don’t ask’.

Now I know that’s insane and we are inevitably going to be bit in the ass by this practice. But I honestly don’t know how to put into words why it’s bad. It’s so bad I never did it/had to do it in under any capacity so I don’t have any bad experiences to draw from. But my gut tells me this is bad and needs to be changed. It’s so ass-backwards I never had to think why not to do it like that.

How do I communicate that to the team? I think I can think of half a dozen reasons why thats bonkers but I don’t trust myself to be that articulate as someone who worked with enterprise DBs for a decade or two.

It seems this new “phase” of the industry seems to be focused so much on speed and how much can be done by a single individual in a small span of time. LinkedIn and Twitter bros bragging how many apps they’ve “shipped” and deployed, talks about how many agents are being coordinated and how many lines of code are being generated.

I have a lot of projects in my back pocket that I’d love to move on, but I don’t have all the expertise and they would take time. I absolutely, however, have the expertise to prompt my way through them and generate the project without fully understanding what all goes into it. Will I learn as I go? Maybe, but probably not.

I’m so curious what the industry will look like in 5-10 years if we have an overabundance of people who know how to ship with LLM assistance, but flounder without them.

I want to get more done, I want to see my projects come to life, but more than anything: I want to understand what I am …

We have 3 somewhat junior (close to mid-level) devs in our small teams. A bit over 2 YOE. We’re embracing code-gen tools but I’m trying to put together a plan so it’s used responsibly and ‘agentic’ coding is generally not accepted.

However, I don’t think this is being adhered to as well as it should be and I’m a bit worried about the devs committing code that they don’t fully understand.

To test out their understanding of the code and to have an engaging training exercise I created an app that connects to our GitHub, I can select a commit and it will break one of the files that they worked on in that commit, and it gives back a little report. I then had them screen share and I gave them 10 minutes and I observed how they worked through the breaks.

None of them could use a debugger. They just console log everything. This is something I noticed with them before when they first came and there was a bit more hands on training and I tried several times to impress on them the importance …

https://theonion.com/plex-submits-35-bid-for-warner-bros/

I thought you all would enjoy this bit of satire.

Hey, r/selfhosted! Continuing a tradition started last year, I recently published a list of my favorite self-hosted software released in 2025 and thought everyone here might find it interesting.

As usual, the article itself includes screenshots and brief descriptions, but I’ve also provided a list below with links for those who’d prefer not to click through.

Additionally, these apps can also be viewed directly in my app directory using the following shortcut: slfh.st/2025

My Favorite Apps Launched in 2025

• Arcane (Deployment/Management)
• BentoPDF (PDF Toolkit)
• BookLore (Book Library/Reader)
• Docker Compose Maker (Deployment)
• IronCalc (Spreadsheet Engine)
• LoggiFly (Log-based Notifications)
• Mail Archival (Various)
  • Bichon
  • Eonvelope
  • Mail Archiver
  • OpenArchiver
  • Gmail Cleaner
• Media Management (Various)
  • Cinephage
  • MediaManager
  • Mydia
• NoteDiscovery (Note-Taking)
• Pangolin (Reverse Proxy)
• Papra (Document Management)
• PatchMon (Linux Patch Monitoring)
• Postgresus (Database Backups) …