Posted by loumf 9/5/2025
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.
In the next two parts of the book I try to convince managers to give some autonomous time to engineers to do whatever tech debt projects they think is best. With some constraints and accountability.
The best way to be notified by it is to be on my list at loufranco.com or reaching out to me.
Which is all true but the concept of making deliberate trade offs for speed and expedience invariably gets lost.
Stories about ongoing improvement - tech enhancement - just get seen as more positive. Plus that term covers both remediating original shortcut choices as well as new engineering improvements arising.
I once wrote a book (about 400 pages, after editing). No one read it, and rightly so. It covered a topic in a preachy, dictatorial manner. It’s long buried in a deep, unmarked grave, in the desert.
It was accurate, well-written, well-structured, relevant, and useful, but assumed a tone that was pure poison. It was aimed at an audience that did not respond well to the tone.
It was extremely valuable education for me, though. My mother was a scientific editor, and edited the book. It was brutal, and quite humbling, but her work ensured that the book was absolutely perfect. I don’t think I’ve ever shipped anything as close to [unpopular] perfection as that book.
Even though I have never been particularly interested in writing book-length stuff, since then, I continue writing to this day[0]. Here’s the latest thing I did (released a few days ago)[1]. I don’t really write for others; I write for myself.
Good luck.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/
[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/series/passkeys/
[EDITED TO ADD] I typically get some downvotes, when I link to my postings. Long ago, I favorited a comment that I made, explaining this[2]. I don’t expect anyone to actually read it before hitting the down arrow, but I figured that I’d add it here, for elucidation.
I also mostly write for myself, but I want to get more of it out there because I think it's useful.
I didn't know helpthisbook existed. Interesting service.
As you may have noticed, people are conflating the HTB stuff with your material, and HTB should keep that in mind.
I have found that talking about improving software Quality is a deeply unpopular topic, on HN, and that kinda breaks my heart.