Over the last couple months I've been hearing the term "Technical Debt" get thrown around frequently, describing the effect that results when decisions are made in a project or process that cause problems down the line.

As any good developer will tell you, there are usually more than one way to solve the problem. Once you've narrowed down your options to a few viable courses of action, it's usually the fastest or cheapest that gets chosen. I'm not here to say this is an incorrect way to choose between good options, but I'd say that when we're planning the development of a project, or even just a feature, we ought to also say to ourselves, "Which approach will leave us with the least technical debt?"

The problem is that this isn't an easy question to answer, because we don't always know what new technology, approach, service, or totally different alternative is coming down the road. So what seems like the best idea today may be what we lose sleep over a year from now. What are our options, then?