Tech Debt Burndown Podcast Series 3 E1: Tech Debt as a Service
Posted on Friday, Mar 13, 2026
Show Notes
Recording date: Mar 13, 2026
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Tech Debt as a Service (Welcome to the Slopocene)
After a long hiatus, the Tech Debt Burndown podcast has returned for its third season. We’ve got a bunch of episodes (some recorded quite a while ago) in the can, so more to come; along with some fresh stuff, as 2026 has been a wild ride already.
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 slopocene, 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 become termed as ‘ralphing’ is basically sending the coding assistant into a loop until it has successfully met some success criteria in order to exercise the loop: It’s kind of going round and round, and maybe doing lots of pretty dumb stuff, but it keeps trying, right? And you don’t let it stop until it’s got to where you want to go. You’ll probably also define some kind of max loop criteria so you’re not just burning tokens all day long . . .
Hosts
Chris Swan
Chris Swan is an Engineer at Atsign, building the Atsign Platform, an open source networking platform that is putting people in control of their data and removing the frictions and surveillance associated with today’s Internet.
He was previously a Fellow at DXC Technology where he held various CTO roles. Before that he held CTO and Director of R&D roles at Cohesive Networks, UBS, Capital SCF and Credit Suisse, where he worked on app servers, compute grids, security, mobile, cloud, networking and containers.
Chris is an InfoQ Editor writing about cloud, DevOps and security, and is a Dart Google Developer Expert (GDE). He’s a frequent speaking on supply chain security (SBOMs, SLSA and OpenSSF Scorecards), the Dart programming language and AI.
Nick Selby
Nick Selby is the founder and Managing Partner of EPSD, with a career spanning technology leadership, not-for-profit leadership, law enforcement, and cybersecurity. He serves on the board of directors of the National Child Protection Task Force, and the advisory board of Sightline Security.
He has held key executive roles at Evertas, Trail of Bits, 451 Research (now S&P Global Intelligence), and Paxos Trust. He served as Director of Cyber Intelligence and Investigations at the NYPD, and as both paid and reserve Texas police detective specializing in investigations of child sexual abuse material and online investigations.
He is co-author of several books, including Cyber Attack Survival Manual, Blackhatonomics: An Inside Look at the Economics of Cybercrime, and In Context: Understanding Police Killings of Unarmed Civilians; he was technical editor of Investigating Internet Crimes: An Introduction to Solving Crimes in Cyberspace.