Alright, let's be real for a second. You probably got into web development because you like building cool stuff, shipping fast, and seeing your ideas come to life. And then someone, somewhere, convinced you that the only "scalable" or "enterprise-grade" way to do things was with microservices. And now? You're probably drowning in config files, Kubernetes YAML, and a distributed tracing setup that's more complex than your actual business logic.
Sound familiar? Good, because we need to talk.
The Microservice Mirage
Don't get me wrong, microservices can be great. For Google. Or Netflix. Or any other company operating at a scale that makes your entire engineering team look like a single feature branch. But for 90% of us? They're an over-engineered nightmare that slows us down, introduces unnecessary complexity, and ultimately, makes developers miserable.
Why do we fall for it? Because it sounds smart. It sounds "future-proof." It sounds like something senior architects with expensive certifications would recommend. "Decoupled services! Independent deployments! Scalability on demand!" All buzzwords that sound amazing in a PowerPoint but translate to "more headaches than you can possibly imagine" in reality.
You end up with:
- A dozen separate repositories to manage.
- Inter-service communication that's a black box of RPC calls or Kafka queues.
- Debugging sessions that span multiple services, multiple logs, and multiple teams.
- Deployment pipelines that are so intricate, you need a full-time DevOps person just to babysit them.
- The "independent deployment" dream turning into a "dependency hell" reality because everything still needs to talk to everything else.
And for what? To solve problems you don't even have yet.
The Theo Way: Ship Fast, Stay Sane
Here's the controversial take (that really shouldn't be controversial): Start with a monolith. A well-structured, intelligently designed monolith. I'm talking about a full-stack TypeScript application, probably in a monorepo, where your API and frontend live in harmony.
Think Next.js. Think Prisma. Think TRPC. This isn't some ancient, bloated PHP monolith from 2005. This is a modern, typesafe powerhouse that lets you:
- Iterate at ludicrous speed: Need a new feature? Build the API and the UI in the same place, with shared types, and ship it. No coordinating across teams, no complex versioning nightmares.
- Maintain developer sanity: Debugging is a breeze. One codebase, one set of logs (initially), clear boundaries within the application. You can actually understand the whole system in your head.
- Focus on the business: Stop spending half your time wrangling infrastructure and start spending it delivering value. Your users don't care about your service boundaries; they care if the damn thing works.
- Scale smartly: You can scale a monolith vertically for a very long time. When you do hit real scaling bottlenecks, you can identify the specific hot spots and then, only then, consider extracting them into their own services. This is called "planned evolution," not "premature optimization."
When Microservices Make Sense (Rarely, For You)
Look, there are legitimate reasons for microservices:
- Truly independent domains: Think payment processing in a giant e-commerce platform. It's a self-contained unit that rarely changes and has extreme reliability requirements.
- Massive, distributed teams: When you have hundreds of developers, physically separating codebases can reduce merge conflicts. But even then, monorepos with good tooling can often serve just as well.
- Extreme polyglot needs: If you genuinely need some services in Rust for performance, others in Python for data science, and others in Node.js for web APIs, then okay, you have a case. But if it's just "because we want to try Go," please stop.
For most startups, most mid-sized companies, and most new products, a well-built monolith will get you 90% of the benefits with 10% of the pain. You can always break it apart later, when the pain of the monolith outweighs the pain of distributed systems. And trust me, the latter is a very high bar.
So, next time someone tells you to "microservice all the things," push back. Ask why. Ask what problem it's actually solving today. And then go build something awesome, fast, and without the unnecessary architectural baggage. Your future self (and your mental health) will thank you.