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Tech Debt Burndown Podcast S3E5: Cloud vs On-Premises
In episode five of this season of the Tech Debt Burndown podcast, Chris Swan and Nick Selby dive into the widespread misunderstandings and economic realities of choosing between cloud and on-premises infrastructure. They discuss how cloud service providers have driven organizations to perform “lift-and-shift” migrations that replicate messy data center environments in the cloud. Rather than achieving the promised cost savings and agility, these organizations inherit the same technical debt while facing skyrocketing bills and unexpected administrative costs in areas like logging, compliance, and observability. They also highlight that while the cloud is invaluable for early-stage startups and rapid feature deployment, it can quickly become cost-prohibitive without proper optimization, architecture, and governance.
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Tech Debt Burndown Podcast S3E4: Sarah Wells
In the fourth episode of season three of the Tech Debt Burndown podcast, Sarah Wells joins Chris Swan and Nick Selby to talk about the lessons learned from her decade at the Financial Times, and their journey to implementing microservices (the same lessons that informed her book, “Enabling Microservices Success).” We touch on whether the purpose of microservices is to scale a system, or to scale an engineering organisation. By breaking down monoliths into independent domains, teams can reduce cognitive complexity and release software hundreds of times a day. Sarah warns, however, that this shift introduces a “maintenance treadmill,” requiring robust automation for library upgrades, security patching, and cross-service governance to prevent a sprawl of unmanageable tech debt.
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Tech Debt Burndown Podcast S3E3: Matthew Skelton
In episode three of season three of the Tech Debt Burndown podcastTeam Topologies co-author Matthew Skelton joins Chris Swan and Nick Selby to discuss the relationship between tech debt and cognitive load. Matthew explains that every organization has a finite “cognitive load budget,” and technical debt acts as a constant drain on this capacity, creating friction that slows down development and increases operational risk. By framing tech debt in terms of human cognition and team boundaries, the discussion highlights how healthy software evolution depends on keeping systems understandable and manageable for the people who build and run them.
Read moreTech Debt Burndown Podcast S3E2: AI Coding Assistants
In episode two of this season of the Tech Debt Burndown podcast, Chris Swan and Nick Selby chat about how AI Coding Assistants have suddenly become very good, maybe even good enough to write “load bearing” code. The constraints that existed around producing code have potentially disappeared, but other constraints live on, and we’re still finding out what this means for product management.
Read moreTech Debt Burndown Podcast Series 3 E1: Tech Debt as a Service
Tech Debt as a Service (Welcome to the Slopocene) After a long hiatus, the Tech Debt Burndown podcast has returned for its third season. We’ve got a bunch of episodes (some recorded quite a while ago) in the can, so more to come; along with some fresh stuff, as 2026 has been a wild ride already.
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“Technical Debt” and Making the Case for Engineering Work
Every engineering organization I work with has a challenge: making the case for the work you need to do as an engineering team that doesn’t directly result in new or improved features.
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Nick Selby for Fast Company: Tech debt isn’t an ‘IT issue.’ It’s a business strategy
This article by EPSD’s Managing Partner, Nick Selby, appeared in Fast Company’s “Ask the Experts” section on 21 August 2025. Read the excerpt below, and please click through for the full text.
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Velocity’s Edge Podcast S1E2 - Huw Rogers on Tech Debt
If you’re leading a profitable, cash-flow-positive business, you’ve probably watched technical debt pile up: those accumulated consequences of choosing quick fixes over well-designed, long-term solutions. If you’re not carefully managing it, it can become overwhelming.
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