Overthinking, but Professionally: What D&D Can Teach You About Technical Debt

Fifty years of Dungeons & Dragons is quite the lesson in technical debt. Back in 1974, Elf was a class. That is a hard-coded dependency. It was an MVP that shipped, but five years later, when a user inevitably wanted a Dwarven Wizard, the backend required a massive re-architecture. Fast forward to 3rd Edition, and the vendor delivered an over-engineered SAP implementation where calculating a…