I once turned a perfectly healthy application into a slow-motion disaster, and I did it on purpose, with a slide deck, feeling extremely clever.
We had a single codebase that worked. It was a little messy, sure. But it shipped, it scaled fine for our size, and a new engineer could understand it in a week.
I split it into a dozen microservices. I thought I was building for the future. What I actually built was a year of pain and a lesson I now repeat to anyone who'll listen.
The decision I regret most was adopting a complex distributed architecture before we had the problem it solves. Microservices fix organizational and scaling problems we didn't have yet, and in exchange they tax everything — every feature, every deploy, every debugging session. We paid the cost up front and never collected the benefit.
The short version:
I want to be honest about the real reasons, because they're so common.
Part of it was technical anxiety. I read that "real" companies used microservices. Our humble single application felt amateur next to all those architecture diagrams with neat little boxes and arrows. I wanted to feel like we were building something serious.
Part of it was resume-driven. Microservices were the thing to know. Building them meant learning them on company time, and some quiet part of me knew that.
And part of it was a genuine but premature worry about scale. "What if we get huge and the monolith can't handle it?" We were nowhere near that problem. We were optimizing for a future that was years away and might never arrive.
None of these are good reasons to add enormous complexity. I made an architecture decision to soothe my own insecurity, dressed up as forward planning. Recognizing that pull toward complexity-for-status is a big part of the brutal truth about becoming a senior developer: seniority is often the confidence to ship the boring, simple thing.
The bill came due slowly, then all at once.
A feature that used to touch one codebase now touched four services, each with its own deploy, its own version, its own way of failing. A simple change became a coordination problem.
Debugging went from reading a stack trace to detective work across a half-dozen logs that didn't agree on what time it was. A bug could hide in the gaps between services — the messages lost, the timeouts, the race conditions that only existed because we'd introduced a network where there used to be a function call.
Local development, once "run one command," became an exercise in spinning up a constellation of services just to test a single screen. New engineers took weeks, not days, to become productive.
Here's the brutal comparison:
| Task | Before (single app) | After (microservices) |
|---|---|---|
| Add a cross-cutting feature | One change, one deploy | Coordinate 3–4 services |
| Debug a failure | Read one stack trace | Correlate logs across services |
| Run it locally | One command | Orchestrate many services |
| Onboard a new dev | About a week | Several weeks |
| A request fails halfway | Impossible | A normal Tuesday |
We hadn't bought scalability. We'd bought a network connecting things that never needed to be apart, and we paid interest on it every single day.
The principle I extracted, and now treat as close to sacred: choose the simplest architecture that could possibly work, and add complexity only when reality forces your hand.
Microservices aren't bad. They solve genuine problems — letting large teams ship independently, scaling specific hot paths, isolating failure domains. The problem is those are big-company problems, and we imported the big-company solution before we had the big-company problem.
Every architectural choice is a trade. Distributed systems trade simplicity for independence and scale. If you're not collecting the independence and scale, you're just paying the simplicity cost for nothing. Martin Fowler's writing on monolith-first design makes the same argument from the other direction: earn your way into distribution, don't start there. It's the same hard-won restraint I had to learn the slow way in I rewrote my app from scratch.
Architecture isn't about building for the company you dream of being. It's about serving the company you actually are, today, without mortgaging tomorrow.
The healthy version of forward-thinking isn't "build the complex thing now in case we need it." It's "build the simple thing in a way that could be split later if we ever genuinely need to." Keep clean boundaries inside the simple system. Earn the right to distribute it by actually hitting the wall first.
The disaster rewired how I approach system design. A few rules I follow now:
The hardest part is emotional, not technical. You have to be secure enough to ship the simple thing while other people post about their elaborate architectures. Boring, for most teams, is the advanced move.
I'll end the story honestly, because I left us in the disaster and you deserve to know it had an exit.
We didn't do a second dramatic rewrite — I'd learned my lesson about those. Instead, we consolidated patiently. Services that had no good reason to be separate got merged back together, one careful pair at a time. The ones that genuinely earned their independence — a couple of components with real, different scaling needs — we kept. The rest came home.
It took the better part of a year to undo what I'd spent a year building. That symmetry still stings. Two years, round trip, to arrive at an architecture only slightly different from where we started — except now every boundary in it was there for a reason we could state in a sentence.
That's the real cost of premature complexity. It's not just the time to build it. It's the time to live with it, plus the time to walk it back, plus the features that never shipped while you did both. The whole detour bought us nothing but the lesson.
But the lesson was worth a lot. The team that came out the other side has a near-religious respect for simplicity now. When someone proposes splitting something, the first question in the room is always the same: what specific problem do we have today that this solves? More often than not, the honest answer ends the conversation. That instinct is the one good thing the disaster gave us.
If you'd rather collect these architecture lessons than pay for them yourself, it's worth following along with the rest of the series.
Q: Are microservices always the wrong choice? Not at all. They're the right choice when you have multiple teams stepping on each other in one codebase, or specific components with wildly different scaling needs. The mistake isn't using them — it's using them before you have those problems, as a default instead of a response.
Q: How do I know when I've genuinely outgrown a monolith? You'll feel it as concrete, recurring pain: teams blocked on each other's deploys, one component's load threatening the whole system, deploy coordination becoming a daily tax. When the simple architecture is the thing actively hurting you, it's time. Not before.
Q: Can't I just split things later? Isn't that risky? Splitting a well-organized monolith later is real work, but it's far cheaper than living with premature distribution for years. If you keep clean module boundaries, extracting a service when you truly need one is a manageable project — not the rewrite people fear.
Q: What if leadership wants the impressive architecture? Translate it into cost. Show the concrete tax on velocity, debugging, and onboarding versus the specific benefit you'd actually collect today. "This adds months of complexity to solve a problem we won't have for two years" is a language that lands. Frame simple as the disciplined choice it is.
The architecture I regret wasn't bad technology. It was a good solution to a problem I didn't have, adopted to feel impressive rather than to serve the product. The cost was everything that solution promises in reverse — slower features, harder debugging, longer onboarding — paid daily for a benefit that never showed up.
Build for the company you are, not the one on your vision board. Choose the simplest architecture that could possibly work, keep your boundaries clean, and let real, present pain be the only thing that buys you more complexity.
Before your next big design decision, ask the only question that matters: what specific problem, that I have today, does this solve? If you can't answer it cleanly, you already know what to do.
No following, no network, no luck. Just an unglamorous system I ran for eighteen months. Here's exactly what I did.
I went from 200 to 11,000 subscribers without hiring anyone. AI didn't write my newsletter — it did everything around it.
I chased big, audacious goals for years and burned out every time. Then I built my whole life around wins so small they felt like cheating.
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