Comparison
Data swampvsTechnical debt
Data swamp
there are nine thousand tables in the bucket, four of them are used, and nobody knows which four.
A lake that accumulated data without ownership, documentation or lifecycle, so nothing in it can be trusted or safely deleted. It is the predictable end state of storing everything with no catalogue and no retention, and it is expensive twice: in storage and in every hour spent working out which of five similar tables is the real one. It is worth naming because the remedy is governance and deletion rather than more storage.
Full entry →Technical debt
you shipped the quick version to make the date, wrote down what you skipped, and paid for it every sprint after.
A deliberate trade of future ease for present speed, taken knowingly. The metaphor is load-bearing: debt has a principal and interest, taking it can be correct, and the danger is unserviced interest rather than the borrowing itself. Used precisely it is one of the few ways to make a technical argument financially legible to people who do not read code; used as a synonym for 'code I dislike' it stops working entirely.
Full entry →