2024-05-07 The Technical Debt Snowball

What I Did

I’ve been atomizing the groups into their respective domains. It’s tedious work, but I’ve been learning to enjoy it, especially after my Technical Debt Snowball (more in the next section).

Plenty of drudgery, nothing interesting to talk about, though I was able to add actionable TheoLogos reading list items instead of letting it clog up my relaxation time.

What I Learned

I’ve invented a new system for working through gargantuan technical debt accumulation. It’s called the Technical Debt Snowball.

This TDS isn’t that groundbreaking, but addresses multiple problems at once:

1. Big piles of things to do are scary.
2. That scary perception makes it difficult about where to start.
3. The stuff has to get done.
4. Once you get started, it’s easier to keep going, but it’s hard to get started.

The idea is simply Dave Ramsey’s Debt Snowball, applied to technical debt:

1. Quantify how many items you have in each pile.
2. List the quantities from smallest to largest.
3. Focus on the smallest pile as the dominant scope of your work, even if you bounce around everywhere else with related elements.
4. Celebrate each time you knock out a pile.

I made it a priority to sift through 30 pages a day to sufficiently be done with this project by the end of the calendar year. This system has allowed me to track how well I’m doing. As of last week, I was anticipating I’d be done by 11/25, but now it looks like 11/13.

What I’m Doing Now

My Grandiose De-Hoarding Mission is on track, loosely guided by a Johnny.Decimal-like system:

• It consists of 9,383 files, each one containing between 1 and 10 elements.
• As I go, each condensation or output will make fewer files, but each re-categorization will likely make more files.
• The number is moderately arbitrary relative to results, thereby avoiding the risk of Goodhart’s Law while also implying I’ve made some sort of progress.

The project will eventually send everything to 3 possible places:

1. My essays will be updated, most notably NotaGenius and Trendless Tech.
2. My toolbox, if it’s potentially useful.
3. The primitives and templates for future projects.

Throughout the entire system, I maintain a schema that reflects the content I’m building:

The flow of work represents itself through a unique semi-ordered flow of “phases”:

1. Separate out the guides, opinions, and tools for each section (0->a-d).
2. Send grouped inbox items into their appropriate categories (000-001->100-86170).
3. Update the old content I’ve already written (100-750).
4. Finish out a few easy pages (800).
5. Add ready-to-go content updates (a).
6. Finish the Entrepreneurship pages (8580).
7. Finish the Management pages (8590).
8. Finish the Math pages (180).
   • I’m aiming for breadth, not depth. I don’t need to perform combinatorics in my head, but I do need to explain in plain English what the heck each math “thing” is, traced along a pseudo-path through the route of standard formalized education:
     • Basic arithmetic
     • Algebra
     • Geometry/trigonometry
     • Statistics
     • Calculus
     • Number theory, with a likely divergence into applied maths and game theory. Along the way, I’ll keep a jargon-resistant dictionary of the big math words.
9. Bounce around Trendless Tech for a while (86013-86170).