A new hire recently asked me over lunch, “What does DigitalOcean’s tech debt look like?”
I could not help but smile when I heard the question. Software engineers asking about a company’s tech debt is the equivalent of asking about a credit score. It’s their way of gauging a company’s questionable past and what baggage they’re carrying. And we’re no stranger to technical baggage.
As a cloud provider that manages our own servers and hardware, we have faced complications that many other startups have not encountered in this new era of cloud computing. These tough situations ultimately led to tradeoffs we had to make early in our existence. And as any quickly growing company knows, the technical decisions you make early on tend to catch up with you later.
Looking at the new hire from across the table, I took a deep breath and began. “Let me tell you about the time we had 15,000 direct connections to our database….”
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