Technical debt isn't always bad

Technical debt is usually referred to negatively, but technical debt isn't always bad.

The key thing is to know when and why you're taking on technical debt and when it will be addressed.

If you have a goal or deadline to meet, you may decide to take on technical debt to release a feature sooner or a simpler version is released now and a more complex version will come later.

I've done this on multi-site Drupal projects before, where I've hard-coded a background image URL as part of a minimum-viable version and made it changeable only when it needed to be - i.e. when the second website was introduced.

For the initial version, that approach was good enough and meant we could move forward.

The client and I decided to take on this technical debit in advance so we could release it sooner, and we knew when and how we were going to address it and pay it back.

This was a good situation, not a bad one.