[SheepSlapper]

Or how about developer maturity? Looking back at some of the projects I worked on when I was just starting out as a professional developer, I can tell you without a doubt that I introduced technical debt. It wasn't because of time pressures, I had plenty of time, it was simply because I was so green that I didn't know any better.

For example, I built a distributed video transcoding system a few years back, and for the use case at the time it worked great. But let's say people want a new video format? That's a large rewrite. Want to add more servers into the worker pool? That's a large rewrite (the code was written to assume a 1:1 ratio of certain servers, which was dumb).

Basically anything that you might want to change was made harder by the code that I wrote to get the job done initially. Over the years you start to recognize that, and write your code a little smarter and more change tolerant (hopefully introducing less technical debt).

[AndrewKemendo]

Agreed, though I would distinguish tech "debt" from using your same tool to solve different problems. In general I would view tech debt as something that you know you are incurring eg. this situation: I know that this hack I am doing is going to need to be fixed later to implement Y, but since we need to implement X right now we have to just get it done