OUTRAGED RACOON COACHING

VP Eng | ILM Executive Coach | Neurodivergent | Chief Racoon Officer

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We Can't Be Trusted With Microservices (And the AI Knows It)

We took one application
that worked
and shattered it into forty
that mostly don’t,
gave each one a database,
a backlog, and
many a deeply held opinion.

Now changing a button
is a high-stakes negotiation
across six teams,
two time zones,
twelve product managers,
and a Slack channel
everyone muted in 2022.

We did this to feel modern.
We did this because
conference talks
made us feel small.
We did this because
a diagram with more arrows
looks a lot
like progress.

Then the AI arrived,
and read the entire monolith
in one calm breath.
It looked at our
burning service catalogue,
and asked:
“Why?”

So now we’re going back.
To the big boring thing
that worked.
A decade of distributed systems,
event buses and
service meshes.
Only to discover
the optimal number of applications
was one.

We arrived exactly
where we started.
But tired.

P.S. Not sure why the raccoon thinks having one app will remove time zones and meetings. Enjoy the cursed whiteboard words. You’re welcome.

Come share your own microservices horror-story haiku on LinkedIn

a weary raccoon at a desk in front of a whiteboard headed OUR MICROSERVICES, a sprawling tangle of boxes like PAYMENTS, NOTIFICATIONS, ORDER-SVC and RIDER-SVC connected by arrows, covered in sticky notes saying WTF IS THIS, WHO OWNS THIS, DON'T TOUCH PROD and GOOD LUCK; a second whiteboard headed THE PLAN with 1. ONE APPLICATION and a ticked list reading No Network Calls, No Time Zones, No Meetings, No Slack Drama, No Service Catalog, No Fire Drills; a mug reading MONOLITHS: BIG. BORING. BEAUTIFUL, a laptop sticker reading DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS DISTRIBUTED MY SANITY, a notebook reading LESS SERVICES MORE SLEEP, an I SURVIVED THE SERVICE MESH cap, a stack of books with titles like THE ART OF OVER-ENGINEERING and YOU CAN'T SCALE A MESS, and a sign reading SOMETIMES THE BEST ARCHITECTURE IS THE ONE THAT ALREADY WORKS