Have you ever been frustrated that your warnings and opinions on technical debt are going unheard? Or you’ve felt pushed to deploy code and software updates that are either not ready, or will cause your team more headaches than other stakeholders appreciate? You’re not alone. Whether you are building an early-stage startup or working at a vast 20-year-old monolith, technical debt mounts as you make changes and deploy new functionality.

Back in the bad old days of battleship grey UIs, rounded corners made up with GIF files and “Best Viewed With Netscape Navigator 3.0” badges, businesses just wanted their software teams to ship – quality be damned! In today’s modern software world, things are much different. Technology leaders are expected to deliver on time.

Thanks to advancements in JavaScript engines, the performance of websites has considerably improved in recent years. However, there are aspects of websites that are out of the control of engines and yet to be adequately optimized by browsers. One of these aspects is the number of HTTP requests that your webpage makes.

As you’re juggling deployments, writing code, and attending meetings there’s not a great deal of time left for staying up to date with the latest trends in tech. The culture around performance is getting stronger — performance is absolutely a feature, yet the pressure is on to deliver more without sacrificing quality. The good news is that there are companies who have achieved their performance goals — and more.

Every software professional in a leadership role is concerned about the caliber of software that gets into the hands of customers. Questions like, is the new app slow to load? Is it working as it should? Why has churn increased? Are natural consequences of building software, yet we don’t always get the answers we need.

Debugging. It’s one of the most time-consuming ways of finding a bug. As a senior .NET developer, I can tell you that it’s best to avoid the necessity for debugging altogether by writing clean code that’s covered by automated tests. If you’re a senior developer yourself, you probably already know this. And if you’re a junior developer, now you know it too! However, the world isn’t binary.