Thanks for writing this down @Ken. You're another example that learning the failure modes is the main benefit of being a consultant for many clients. Since I'm sure you began each audit meeting with the CTO/VPE and possibly others like senior devs/architects, how much of what you ended up finding in the audits was predictable based on those meetings? (I'm guessing almost everything).

My follow-up question is that once you heard about their snazzy microservices architecture, were you ever surprised by it being a good decision based on the product type and how well it was engineered?