Claim OwnershipTechnical Debt: Design, risk and beyond
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© 2026 Technical Debt: Design, risk and beyond
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We talk to experienced architects and technology leaders about the architectural choices they’ve made — the good, the bad, and the costly. From scaling systems to integrating legacy platforms, from misaligned domains to governance gaps, we discuss how architecture impacts technical debt.
You’ll hear honest stories of architectural missteps, what teams learned from them, and how they built systems designed not just to work, but to last.
15 Episodes
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In this episode of Technical Debt: Design, Risk, and Beyond, we look at technical debt from a place it’s rarely discussed - the CEO’s desk. My guest is David Cruz, Founder & CEO of Elmaextro, certified business coach, and thought leader in governance, resilience, and information risk. David’s journey spans operational leadership during major crises, advisory work with CEOs and leadership teams, and years spent translating information risk into strategic and architectural consequences. We ...
In this episode of Technical Debt: Design, Risk and Beyond, Maxim Silaev speaks with Erioluwa Asiru, CTO at CircleFunds, about what technical debt really looks like inside a fast-growing fintech operating in an emerging market. CircleFunds is digitising traditional thrift savings in Nigeria: a problem that turns out to be far more complex than “building an app.” Erioluwa shares how early architectural decisions were shaped by human behavior, cultural practices, and the reality that some proce...
In this episode of Technical Debt: Design, Risk and Beyond, Maxim Silaev is joined by Rob Broadhead, a technology leader with more than 30 years of experience across enterprise systems, startups, and consulting. Together, they explore how technical debt actually creeps into systems: not through bad engineering, but through reasonable decisions made under pressure. Rob shares early-career scars, leadership failures without happy endings, and hard-earned lessons about how debt becomes normalise...
In this episode of Technical Debt: Design, Risk and Beyond, hosts Maxim Silaev and Nikita Golovko break down one of the most widely documented technical-debt disasters in modern enterprise IT: the failed 2018 TSB Bank migration. More than two million customers lost access to their accounts, systems malfunctioned for weeks, and leadership was forced to answer to regulators. But behind the headlines lies a deeper lesson: technical debt exists at multiple layers: strategic, product, and architec...
What happens when a company’s biggest vulnerability isn’t its software, but its communication? In this episode of Technical Debt: Design, Risk and Beyond, hosts Maxim Silaev and Nikita Golovko explore the collapse of Interserve, a UK-based outsourcing and construction giant that suffered a major data breach in 2020, exposing the personal data of over 100,000 employees and resulting in a £4.4 million fine from the Information Commissioner’s Office. The breach was more than a phishing email gon...
Secure Boot was designed to solve one of the most fundamental security problems in computing: how to ensure that only trusted software starts your machine. But like any architectural decision, it came with its own trade-offs, and its own technical debt. In this episode of Technical Debt: Design, Risk and Beyond, Maxim Silaev and Nikita Golovko explore Secure Boot as a case study in how solving one kind of debt often creates another. Maxim explains how the pre-Secure Boot world fragmented BIOS...
Technical debt is not just about code! it is the visible symptom of deeper organisational issues. When companies try to move faster than their systems, teams, or leadership structures allow, debt shows up in technology but originates elsewhere. In this episode of Technical Debt: Design, Risk, and Beyond, we will talk with Simon Copsey, a management and technology leader who writes and consults on how technical debt reflects strategy, culture, and communication. Simon shares why debt is ...
Frontend moves fast — but with every new framework, testing shortcut, or design compromise, teams risk piling up technical debt that quickly becomes visible to users and costly to the business. In this episode of Technical Debt: Design, Risk, and Beyond, we talk with Christian Joecker, a web developer and UX designer with over 10 years of experience helping companies like BMW, Volkswagen, United Airlines, and the Fraunhofer Institute build and scale digital products. Christian shares his pers...
Everyone has their own definition of "architecture". For some, it is diagrams. For others, it is documentation, a set of rules, or technical excellence. Some see it as task-setting, others as an evolving discipline. But what does IT architecture really mean in practice? In this episode of Technical Debt: Design, Risk and Beyond, hosts Maxim Silaev and Nikita Golovko unpack the many faces of architecture. Drawing on real-world stories, they explore how architecture is more than static rules: i...
In this episode of Technical Debt: Design, Risk and Beyond, hosts Maxim Silaev and Nikita Golovko explore whether artificial intelligence can really spot technical debt more effectively than human architects and engineers. Drawing on real-world projects: from investor due diligence to scaling SaaS platforms, they share stories of how AI has surfaced invisible hotspots, misread healthy churn as risk, and mapped sprawling dependencies. Together, they examine three critical signals of hidden deb...
We often talk about “paying off technical debt” as if it were a one-time event, but is that even possible? In this episode, Maxim Silaev and Nikita Golovko dive deep into what it truly means to address technical debt and why the language of "paying off" can be misleading. Through personal stories, hard lessons, and client case studies, they will examine when refactoring creates real value, and when it is just polishing code, and why debt reduction must be tied to business outcomes. They discu...
Legacy doesn’t have to mean “bad.” In this episode of Technical Debt: Design, Risk and Beyond, hosts Maxim Silaev and Nikita Golovko discuss and challenge the myths around legacy code. They explore when legacy systems are a liability, when they’re a quiet strength, and why fear often drives decisions more than facts. Drawing from personal stories and consulting experiences, they discuss real cases where legacy code either supported growth for years or quietly undermined business stability. Yo...
As engineering teams grow, many organizations expect velocity to increase, but often the opposite happens. In this episode, we will explore the invisible costs of scaling headcount without evolving your system architecture. From onboarding delays to tangled communication paths and team overlap, we break down why more people often leads to less effective delivery. We dive into the architectural principles that help teams scale safely: service boundaries, team ownership models, platform thinkin...
In this episode, we explore how product strategy - even when not explicitly technical - has a profound and in most times invisible impact on software architecture. From market segmentation to feature prioritisation, many product decisions quietly affect long-term architectural consequences. We unpack how phrases like "just support one more use case" or "we might add multi-tenancy later" seem innocent, but translate directly into complexity, coupling, and irreversible system shape. When archit...
In this episode, we explore how technical debt is not just a code problem — it's a cultural one. Together, we unpack the elements of a healthy engineering culture that naturally guards against the slow decay of software systems. We start by defining what “engineering culture” really means and how it silently shapes every architectural decision, shortcut, and trade-off. From there, we dive into practical habits and team rituals that act as cultural safeguards: meaningful code reviews, shared c...
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