Alright, let me tell you about this thing back in 2022. Feels like ages ago now, but it sticks with me. It wasn’t some big, dramatic protest, nothing like that. It was more… quiet. Inside the place I worked.
The Big Push
So, 2022. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was jumping on the microservices bandwagon. You couldn’t walk down the hallway without hearing about breaking down the monolith, scalability, independent deployments. Management bought into it hook, line, and sinker after some fancy conference. Suddenly, every new project had to be microservices. No discussion.
I got assigned this new module. It was supposed to handle user profile updates. Not exactly rocket science, right? Pretty standard stuff. The architect immediately drew up this complex diagram. Five separate microservices, a message queue, distributed transactions… the whole nine yards. Just for updating a user’s name and email.
My Gut Feeling
I looked at this plan. I spent a couple of days trying to wrap my head around implementing it. Setting up the CI/CD pipelines for five tiny services. Figuring out the communication protocols. Handling potential data inconsistencies if one service failed mid-update. It just felt… wrong. Utterly overkill. Like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
We were a small team. We didn’t have dedicated DevOps people just sitting around. Maintaining this zoo of services for such a simple feature? It smelled like trouble down the road. More points of failure, way harder debugging. I just couldn’t see the benefit outweighing the massive PITA it was going to be.
Going Against the Grain
So, I decided to push back. Gently at first. In a team meeting, I raised my hand.
- “Hey, uh, isn’t this a bit much for profile updates?”
- “Could we maybe just… add this to the existing user service monolith? It seems like a natural fit there.”
Silence. Then the architect started talking about future-proofing and decoupling. Management nodded along. My team lead gave me that ‘don’t rock the boat’ look.
But I couldn’t just let it go. It felt irresponsible. So, I did something maybe a bit sneaky. I spent a weekend, my own time, and just built the feature the simple way. Added the endpoints to our existing main application. Wrote the tests. It took me maybe six hours, tops.
Monday morning, during our stand-up, I didn’t say much. But later, I grabbed my team lead.
“Look,” I said, showing him my screen. “It’s done. Works perfectly. Simple code, easy to test, easy to deploy. Took me half a day.”
He was kind of stunned. He clicked around, checked the code. He knew I was right. The microservice plan? The team assigned to start setting up the infrastructure for it hadn’t even gotten the first container running yet.
The Aftermath
Long story short, after some awkward conversations where I had to demo my ‘rogue’ solution, they quietly shelved the five-microservice plan for the profile updates. My simple approach went into production. It just worked. No drama, no late-night calls about services being down.
It wasn’t a huge victory. Nobody threw me a parade. In fact, I think the architect avoided eye contact with me for a month. But it felt right. Sticking to common sense when everyone else was chasing the shiny new thing. That was my little 2022 rebellion. Sometimes, not following the crowd is the most practical thing you can do.
