Every developer inherits technical debt, whether it is a codebase built by a third party, a codebase at a new job, or even ones own codebase that they have not touched in a few years. I am going to talk about my experience of inheriting technical debt when I joined on as the lead engineer for a large publication’s website. The codebase was built by a third party and has been running live for a few years. Some of the things I will explain are, how I code audited the codebase and came up with some key major fixes that would greatly increase performance and load time, came up with a strategy and prioritized how to go about executing the fixes, and lastly how I executed the strategy and what the overall outcome (performance, load times, etc.) of the site was when finished. The reason I’d like to give this speech is the fact that I think a lot of people in the audience have been in the same situation as I have at one point in time and after my speech, they will have an understanding of how to go about fixing the technical debt if they ever end up in that situation again in the future.