The Tech Debt Burndown Podcast
Chris Swan and Nick Selby, two long-time technology industry and information security leaders, discuss issues related to reducing technical debt.
Episodes
July 8, 2026 • 21 mins
Chris and Nick talk about how organizational growth introduces process inefficiencies and inter-departmental friction, which can be diagnosed and addressed using value stream mapping. They emphasize that automating systems successfully relies on robust exception handling rather than just building for the "happy path," sharing a banking case study where classifying and systematically resolving exception classes (via a system dubbed ...
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July 1, 2026 • 23 mins
Chris and Nick speak with Georg Schleiermacher, former CTO of Hyperloop Spain and veteran of MTU Aero Engines, to explore technical debt in the aviation sector. Georg explains that because aero engines remain in service for up to 50 years with frozen designs, making any changes—even updating a single screw or a computer processor's FADEC software—requires extensive, expensive regulatory recertification. This rigid proce...
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June 24, 2026 • 17 mins
Nick and Chris explore the behavioral, cultural, and financial implications of deploying AI coding assistants, framing their erratic behavior as that of an "overeager intern" that prioritizes speed over rigor. Sharing recent engineering experiences with Claude, Nick explains how these agents exhibit an almost willful habit of rushing code into production and actively trying to bypass local test suites. Rather than outputting the ra...
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June 17, 2026 • 31 mins
Nick and Chris talk about the security, data privacy, and operational challenges of enterprise AI adoption, highlighting how executive pressure driven by “Fortune front page FOMO” often leads to hasty deployments. Drawing from a presentation by ARM’s Richard Grisenthwaite on trustable AI, they emphasize that the majority of AI security relies on foundational security practices that organizations should already hav...
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June 10, 2026 • 26 mins
Chris and Nick 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 de...
Rather than achieving the promised cost savings and agility, these organizations inherit the same technical de...
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June 3, 2026 • 25 mins
Sarah Wells joins Nick and Chris 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 a...
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May 27, 2026 • 26 mins
Team Topologies co-author Matthew Skelton joins Chris and Nick 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 hi...
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May 20, 2026 • 18 mins
Chris and Nick chat about how AI Coding Assistants have suddenly become very good, maybe even good enough to write 'load bearing' code. So the constraints the existed around producing code have potentially disappeared; but other constraints live on, and we're still finding out what this means for product management.
Some time is spent on whether languages and frameworks still matter, and it seems they do. But also guardrails...
Some time is spent on whether languages and frameworks still matter, and it seems they do. But also guardrails...
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May 13, 2026 • 19 mins
After a long hiatus, the Tech Debt Burndown podcast has returned for its third season. Chris Swan and Nick Selby kick off the season with a discussion of what Chris has called Tech Debt as a Service: how we’ve entered the slopper scene, and how we are working with our magical AI coding assistants.
We start with a discussion of multi-agent coordination frameworks, one of which is called Ralph Wiggum, and what's be...
We start with a discussion of multi-agent coordination frameworks, one of which is called Ralph Wiggum, and what's be...
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January 9, 2023 • 41 mins
Krzysztof - Chris - Daniel talks to Nick and Chris about Wardley Mapping and better corporate strategies.
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August 8, 2021 • 32 mins
In the Season 1 Finale, Yosef Lehrman talks to Nick and Chris about the Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity.
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June 20, 2021 • 27 mins
Allan Friedman of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has long been one of the world's leading proponents of Software Bill of Materials, or SBOM. With the President's Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity, SBOM has begun to receive the wider attention it deserves, and Allan joins Chris and Nick to discuss SBOM and how it can help with tech debt burndown.
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June 13, 2021 • 25 mins
Eoin Woods has developed quite a bit of software, and created and dealt with quite a lot of technical debt. He is CTO at Endava, and co-author of two software architecture books. On the Tech Debt Burndown he joins Chris and Nick to talk about his role in the International Conference on Technical Debt and some of the research highlighted in the virtual 2021 edition of that conference, as well as his own personal experiences in the f...
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June 6, 2021 • 31 mins
Charity Majors joins Nick and Chris to discuss the difference between observability and metrics, some great insights into good debt (like college loans) versus bad debt (like charging stuff we want on a credit card), and thoughts on efficiency.
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May 29, 2021 • 1 min
With the US closed for Memorial Day weekend, and the UK closed for Spring Bank Holiday, we're firing up the grills, and pausing to reflect. In the next few episodes, we'll discuss toil and build times with Charity Majors, Tech Debt burndown strategies with Eoin Woods, the Biden Executive Order with Yosef Lehrman, SBOMs with Allan Friedman, and much, much more!
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May 23, 2021 • 34 mins
On this episode, Chris and Nick are joined by Olivier Jacques, DevOps transformation principal at DXC Technology, who discusses his article, Six Strategies to Set Time Aside to Improve. The six approaches capture some very insightful observations into technical debt burndown.
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