Swimming in Tech Debt
This is the first half of my book, “Swimming in Tech Debt”. It is available at a pre-launch sale price of $0.99 (https://loufranco.com/tech-debt-book). I have been working on it since January 2024. It is based on some posts in my blog, but expands on my ideas quite a bit. In September 2024, excerpts appeared in Gergely Orosz’s Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, which helped me get a lot of feedback that expanded the book from my initial idea. This half is about what I expected to do before that —- the rest of the book goes into team and CTO practices.
Swimming in Tech Debt launched on September 5, 2025 with 167 votes, #187 of 8,160 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
Swimming in Tech Debt is the first half of a book exploring technical debt in software development. Written for developers and technical leaders, it covers foundational concepts and what to expect before diving into team and CTO practices covered in the second half. The book evolved from blog posts and feedback from the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, providing expanded insights on managing and understanding technical debt in real-world development environments.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Practical Techniques to Keep Your Team from Drowning in Its Codebase · By Lou Franco · on Help This Book
Lou Franco is a software industry veteran who has been shipping software and leading development teams since 1992. He has worked for four startups and the companies that acquired them, most recently with Trello at Atlassian. He is currently a software product engineering consultant. In 2014, he co-authored "Hello! iOS Development" and in 2025 he wrote a book called “Swimming in Tech Debt” In Swimming in Tech Debt , veteran engineer, manager, and technical executive Lou Franco defines tech debt not as something you “owe,” but as resistance—like swimming upstream. Drawing from more than 30 years of building and leading software teams, Franco offers a practical, research-backed guide to…from helpthisbook.com
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