A digital ecommerce transformation (2017)

While this is a true horror story, this is how I feel about microservices. Simple things take forever because the unnecessary complexity is through the roof. I do not experience the "developer ergonomics" that I used to.

Every microservice will get its own share or lack thereof of love, have possibly different wiring, be written in a different language, and may or may not have good enough tests. Most likely the system integration tests are non-existent either so good luck with that regression.

That's after you figure out how to set up your environment locally just for this one task, making sure that all services are up to date, starting properly, have the right local settings, and communicate with each other without issues.

What should take minutes now takes days.

In the beginning of my career I worked on a volatile multidimensional house of cards project. It was a classic ASP enterprise content management system, patched together by external contractors for 10 years or so, with seemingly no structure at all. The code base was truly “magical” in the sense that it was a miracle that it sort of worked. Contained a number of “don’t change this” and gotchas.

Projects like this doesn’t build character, it just sucks.

Parts of this feel very familiar to me - years ago I worked on a PHP application originally built in 2003 and it was a jenga tower of missing closing tags in included files that somehow worked, but couldn't be changed because of all the different places they were included.