There are many excellent problem solving techniques in software engineering. Taken as religion, to extremes, most of these will lead the zealot to destruction. Microservices have their place, as do monoliths.
The author's most valuable point is roughly 'don't believe the hype' - and that's timeless. On the specifics, they're certainly right on each point, but they missed the (imo main) one of 'by forcing a conceptual boundary between different pieces of the application, one can build true silos around competences and so scale their org more effectively'. Put simply, a 200 person monolith will usually feel like it has 200 people working on it. That same org split into 5 groups of 40 can be more nimble. In some cases this is due to infra ('we need to get off Java 8' is easier if the software can be run in 5 pieces). In some cases this is due to problem scope (less intertwining of concepts possible).
“There are many excellent problem solving techniques in software engineering. Taken as religion, to extremes, most of these will lead the zealot to destruction.”
This is actually true for a lot of things like nutrition, health or exercise. They start out as a useful thing but then people with a big ego promote them as the solution for everything.
Comments
There are many excellent problem solving techniques in software engineering. Taken as religion, to extremes, most of these will lead the zealot to destruction. Microservices have their place, as do monoliths.
The author's most valuable point is roughly 'don't believe the hype' - and that's timeless. On the specifics, they're certainly right on each point, but they missed the (imo main) one of 'by forcing a conceptual boundary between different pieces of the application, one can build true silos around competences and so scale their org more effectively'. Put simply, a 200 person monolith will usually feel like it has 200 people working on it. That same org split into 5 groups of 40 can be more nimble. In some cases this is due to infra ('we need to get off Java 8' is easier if the software can be run in 5 pieces). In some cases this is due to problem scope (less intertwining of concepts possible).
“There are many excellent problem solving techniques in software engineering. Taken as religion, to extremes, most of these will lead the zealot to destruction.”
This is actually true for a lot of things like nutrition, health or exercise. They start out as a useful thing but then people with a big ego promote them as the solution for everything.