I’m always looking for ways to improve myself as a programmer.  It usually involves something fun, but after reading this post, I think my new area of improvement is to stop increasing my technical debt.

From a related post from Steve McConnell:

Other debt accumulates from taking hundreds or thousands of small shortcuts--generic variable names, sparse comments, creating one class in a case where you should create two, not following coding conventions, and so on. This kind of debt is like credit card debt.
I was doing a review of some relatively mature (3 years) code today with the rest of my team and I found more instances of this kind of technical debt than I would like to admit.

There are other kinds of technical debt, and it’s easy to hate them and the reasons for incurring them, but this small stuff is totally under my control.  And it has to stop.