About ten years ago, I wrote a pair of blog posts (here and here) on the early days of the microservices boom. The industry was rushing toward distributed systems like they were the answer to everything. My argument then: distributed systems offer real power, but the monolith has a tax too, and jumping to distributed systems too early introduces a massive operational burden you probably aren't ready to pay.A decade later, the pendulum is swinging back.We're seeing a wave of high-profile "un-migr

Starting a new role is always full of learning about new people, processes, and systems, but it also often comes with a familiar, daunting challenge: the blank page.Recently, I stepped into a new position, and my first task is to define the strategy and long-term goals for a new area of focus. In the past, this phase of the job meant a lot of siloed research, scheduling fragmented syncs with busy stakeholders, wrestling with initial frameworks, writing drafts of the vision and goals, and sharing