Hot Cross Buns and Technical Debt

I spotted hot cross buns in the supermarket on January 2nd this year. January 2nd. The decorations were barely down, and there they were, stacked proudly on the seasonal shelf, as if February hadn't even been consulted.

It’s a familiar annual outrage. They appear earlier every year. We complain every time. And by Easter, we’ve accepted it.

Technical debt works in exactly the same way.

One small compromise

It usually starts innocuously. A quick fix here, a hard-coded value there. A pipeline that was always meant to be temporary. Nobody raises an alarm. There are deadlines to hit, stakeholders to satisfy, and the compromise is small enough to feel manageable. You'll come back to it. Everyone agrees you'll come back to it.

But you don't.

And the next sprint brings its own pressures, its own shortcuts. The debt quietly accumulates, layer by layer, until one day you're staring at a data architecture that nobody fully understands, built on assumptions that no longer hold, and maintained by workarounds that have themselves been worked around.

Sound familiar?

That's January 2nd. Except now it's your data platform.

The creep becomes the foundation

The real danger isn’t the compromise. It’s the quiet shift in what “normal” looks like. Just as hot cross bun

s gradually stopped being an Easter treat and became a year-round fixture, technical debt stops feeling like debt and starts feeling like just how things are. Teams build around it. Processes accommodate it. New joiners inherit it without question.

By the time an organisation embarks on a cloud migration or data modernisation programme, the debt often isn't sitting at the edges. It's woven into the core. Legacy dependencies, undocumented transformations, brittle integrations: these aren't just technical inconveniences, they're project risks with real cost and timeline implications.

Managing the inevitable

Here's the honest truth: some technical debt is unavoidable. Businesses move fast, priorities shift, and perfect is frequently the enemy of shipped. The goal isn't a zero-debt environment. It's knowing what you're carrying and making deliberate choices about it.

That means surfacing debt early in any migration scoping exercise, not discovering it mid-delivery. It means honest conversations with stakeholders about what "lift and shift" actually lifts and shifts. And it means building remediation into the plan, rather than hoping the new platform magically resolves what the old one accumulated.

Hot cross buns aren't going back to being an Easter-only product. But that doesn't mean you have to be surprised when you find them in January.

Know what’s on your shelf.

Because technical debt doesn’t disappear. It just waits until it matters most.