A Developer’s Identity Crisis

Microservices vs Monolith

By Nigel Dsouza

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Once, we were the keepers of monoliths — towering codebases that held everything in one place.

They were messy, sure.

But they were whole. Understandable.

Then the industry told us to break them.

Split the monolith. Decouple everything.

The age of microservices arrived.

And suddenly, being a developer wasn’t about understanding the system —

It was about understanding your part in it.

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🧩 The Birth of the Fragmented Engineer

In the monolith world, you were a builder of cities.

Now, in microservices, you’re a plumber for a single street.

You own service-accounts-api-v2 — not the domain, not the flow, just the pipe.

And while that’s scalable, it’s also disorienting.

We went from architects to tenants.

From creators to maintainers.

And many of us — whether we admit it or not —

miss the clarity of the monolith.

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🧪 The Myth of Autonomy

Microservices promised autonomy.

Teams could own their services end to end.

But in practice?

We’ve traded cross-functional ownership for cross-team dependencies.

Want to change how onboarding works?

• You need five approvals
• Three PR merges
• And a Slack thread with someone named DevOpsDragon420 who hasn’t replied in days

Autonomy, it turns out, is a UX problem.

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🧠 Monolith as Memory

A monolith is a system with a story.

You can scroll through a file and see the shape of decisions made over time.

You can feel the evolution — the good, the bad, and the hacks that shipped Friday night.

Microservices?

They’re amnesiacs. Stateless. Isolated.

Designed to forget everything except their job.

They scale beautifully.

But they don’t remember why.

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🧭 The Developer’s Dilemma

As engineers, we crave:

• Clarity
• Narrative
• Control

But our tools are increasingly:

• Modular
• Distributed
• AI-assisted

We’re being asked to write symphonies —

while only composing trumpet parts.

So we cling to architecture diagrams like they’re treasure maps.

We over-document.

We invent endless tooling just to reconstruct a view of the system we once held in our heads.

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🛠️ Reclaiming Identity in a Distributed World

It’s time to stop pretending this isn’t hard.

It’s time to design systems that are not just decomposed — but discoverable.

That tell their story.

That welcome new developers like tour guides, not gatekeepers.

That let engineers feel whole again.

Because whether we write monoliths or microservices —

We are still storytellers.

Still problem-solvers.

Still creators.

And we deserve systems that don’t just scale —

But make us feel like developers again.

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👤 About the Author

Nigel Dsouza is a Principal Software Engineer at Fidelity Investments.

He’s built monoliths, broken them, and stitched them into clouds.

He writes not just for the machines,

but for the developers trying to remember why they started.