YAML Engineer

Infrastructure Engineer at Sona

[DHH @dhh]

Microservices is the software industry’s most successful confidence scam. It convinces small teams that they are “thinking big” while systematically destroying their ability to move at all. It flatters ambition by weaponizing insecurity: if you’re not running a constellation of services, are you even a real company? Never mind that this architecture was invented to cope with organizational dysfunction at planetary scale. Now it’s being prescribed to teams that still share a Slack channel and a lunch table.

Small teams run on shared context. That is their superpower. Everyone can reason end-to-end. Everyone can change anything. Microservices vaporize that advantage on contact. They replace shared understanding with distributed ignorance. No one owns the whole anymore. Everyone owns a shard. The system becomes something that merely happens to the team, rather than something the team actively understands. This isn’t sophistication. It’s abdication.

Then comes the operational farce. Each service demands its own pipeline, secrets, alerts, metrics, dashboards, permissions, backups, and rituals of appeasement. You don’t “deploy” anymore—you synchronize a fleet. One bug now requires a multi-service autopsy. A feature release becomes a coordination exercise across artificial borders you invented for no reason. You didn’t simplify your system. You shattered it and called the debris “architecture.”

Microservices also lock incompetence in amber. You are forced to define APIs before you understand your own business. Guesses become contracts. Bad ideas become permanent dependencies. Every early mistake metastasizes through the network. In a monolith, wrong thinking is corrected with a refactor. In microservices, wrong thinking becomes infrastructure. You don’t just regret it—you host it, version it, and monitor it.

The claim that monoliths don’t scale is one of the dumbest lies in modern engineering folklore. What doesn’t scale is chaos. What doesn’t scale is process cosplay. What doesn’t scale is pretending you’re Netflix while shipping a glorified CRUD app. Monoliths scale just fine when teams have discipline, tests, and restraint. But restraint isn’t fashionable, and boring doesn’t make conference talks.

Microservices for small teams is not a technical mistake—it is a philosophical failure. It announces, loudly, that the team does not trust itself to understand its own system. It replaces accountability with protocol and momentum with middleware. You don’t get “future proofing.” You get permanent drag. And by the time you finally earn the scale that might justify this circus, your speed, your clarity, and your product instincts will already be gone.

[YAML Engineer @dsolsona]

@lizthegrey I'm afraid this is just the testing clinics being saturated and taking a long time to deliver test results. There are a few testing locations that have closed over the Christmas period, allegedly due to lack of personnel

[the Juice Media @thejuicemedia]

The Australien Government has made an ad about Hung Parliaments and its surprisingly honest and informative. #Election2022 https://t.co/dIceJSWoKw

[Jeli.io @jeli_io]

We made a new thing! Jeli's all about evolving the industry, but building a new post-incident process is...super hard. So we did it for you. Introducing📄✨ Howie: The Post- Incident Guide. 📄✨ Download it, print it, share it, frame it. Use it to evolve. https://t.co/O4TF68oiAh

[Lorin Hochstein @norootcause]

New blog post, on @jeli_io's Howie guide: https://t.co/DsGmD2dK9u

[Dr Yusef Smith @PropaneFitness]

I just quit being a doctor for the NHS.

Here are 12 reflections:

[Lorin Hochstein @norootcause]

A couple of people have asked me what OOPS writeups look like, so I wrote a blog post about the structure I use for them:

https://t.co/5dSyLeJuEJ

[YAML Engineer @dsolsona]

This was worth watching

[David Woods @ddwoods2]

How to kill zombies of oversimplification (on autonomy & AI). Why do people tenaciously believe myths about the relationship between people & technology https://t.co/vHtGm2FlaW see exchange with Ben Shneiderman at 1:08 to 1:18:20

[Getting There Podcast @GettingThere__]

Our first episode. Never “Meta” Outage (we didn’t like)

[Pouria Hadjibagheri MBE @Pouriaaa]

Cascade of doom: JIT, and how a Postgres update led to 70% failure on a critical national service

For the #DEVCommunity & those who wanted to know more about the issues we had a couple of weeks ago causing the Coronavirus dashboard to become very slow.

https://t.co/xIzxO2c4E0

[microBIO @microBIOblog]

Este video es magnífico: cómo funciona la vacuna de RNA, cómo estimula tu sistema inmune.
https://t.co/OJ8ZjD66Lo

[Doblatge en català @DoblatgeCatala]

Jordi Vila cantant 'Bola de drac' sempre t'alegra el dia.

[Coding Career @Coding_Career]

This is brilliant: Software engineer got tired of getting rejected by automated screeners and tested a theory.

Real resume: 0% success

Obviously fake resume stuffed with buzzwords: 90% success rate

Calls from from Notion, AirBnB, Reddit, Dropbox, Robinhood, etc

[YAML Engineer @dsolsona]

I find quite interesting how many companies are now hiring remote in Europe, such a big difference from a few years ago. The good side of a pandemia I suppose

[Matthew Green @matthew_d_green]

The story here, for those who may have forgotten 2015 (it was a long time ago!) is that the NSA inserted a backdoor into a major encryption standard and then leaned on manufacturers to install it. Thread. 1/

[Jessica DeVita @UberGeekGirl]

This isn't about abortion.

[the Juice Media @thejuicemedia]

The Australien Government has made an ad about Carbon Capture and Storage, and it’s surprisingly honest and informative. #CCS