3 ms·

Generalizations don't help almost any discussion. Even if that's 100% of what you ever saw, many people have seen mixed (or entirely in the other extreme). > I

by pdimitar 10mo ago

Generalizations don't help almost any discussion. Even if that's 100% of what you ever saw, many people have seen mixed (or entirely in the other extreme). > In every monolith, people violate separation of concerns and things are tightly coupled. I have only ever seen good engineering velocity happen when teams are decoupled from one another. I have only seen this happen in a (micro) service architecture. I would write this off as indifferent or incompetent tech leadership. Even languages that people call obscure -- like Elixir that I mostly work with -- have excellent libraries and tools that can help you draw enforceable boundaries. Put that in CI or even in pre-commit hook. Job done. Why was that never done? Of course people will default to the easier route. It's on tech leadership to keep them to higher standards.

sethammons 10mo ago
Funny you mention Elixir. At one company, we passed around Ecto querysets. It started when the company was smaller. Then someone needed a little bit of analytics. And a few years of organic growth later and the system was bogged down. Queries where joining all over the place, and separating out the analytics from everything else was, again, a major undertaking. I would love to see a counter example in real life at an org with over a dozen teams. A well working monolith and a well working monorepo are like unicorns; I don't believe they exist and everyone is talking about and trying to sell their mutant goat as one.
- pdimitar 10mo ago
  I am not selling you anything so you're starting off from a wrong premise. What I said is that you should consider your experience prone to a bubble environment and as such it's very anecdotal. So is mine (a mix), granted. Which only means that neither extreme dominates out there. Likely a normal bell curve distribution. What I did say (along with others) was that a little bit of technical discipline -- accentuating on "little" here -- nullifies the stated benefits of microservice architecture. And it seems to me that the microservice architecture was chosen to overcome organizational problems, not technical ones.

sethammons 10mo ago

Funny you mention Elixir. At one company, we passed around Ecto querysets. It started when the company was smaller. Then someone needed a little bit of analytics. And a few years of organic growth later and the system was bogged down. Queries where joining all over the place, and separating out the analytics from everything else was, again, a major undertaking. I would love to see a counter example in real life at an org with over a dozen teams. A well working monolith and a well working monorepo are like unicorns; I don't believe they exist and everyone is talking about and trying to sell their mutant goat as one.

pdimitar 10mo ago
I am not selling you anything so you're starting off from a wrong premise. What I said is that you should consider your experience prone to a bubble environment and as such it's very anecdotal. So is mine (a mix), granted. Which only means that neither extreme dominates out there. Likely a normal bell curve distribution. What I did say (along with others) was that a little bit of technical discipline -- accentuating on "little" here -- nullifies the stated benefits of microservice architecture. And it seems to me that the microservice architecture was chosen to overcome organizational problems, not technical ones.