How we Handle Tech Debt at Kiddom
summary
Series C edtech with ~50 engineers establishes a vocabulary called gardening and runs a two-week garden party as a deliberate stop the world sprint to buy time for fixes. That yields concrete changes: CI/CD across all repos, a target of 80% unit test coverage, scoped multi-month architectural epics, measurable deploy-lag and incident reductions, a 5,000x perf win from replacing a bad regex on a hot path, and improved employee NPS as maintenance becomes a 20–25% cadence alongside feature work.
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chapters (21)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:00Startup Cycle
- 1:44Series C
- 3:09Where we found ourselves
- 4:43Warning signs
- 5:22Tech that matters
- 5:37Work in progress
- 8:09Stop the World
- 9:49Normalize Maintenance
- 12:04Prioritize Projects
- 15:35Where we are now
- 17:02What weve learned
- 19:18Maturity
- 20:05Additional Info
- 20:40Stop to World
- 21:41Managing Resistance
- 23:22Measuring Tech Debt
- 24:25Enhancing User Experience
- 26:14How do you prioritize Tech Debt
- 28:08How do you motivate Engineers
- 29:11Biggest difference between a startup and a big company
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