Unlearn faster

When I started engineering seriously, I carried a lot of "correct" patterns in my head.

Microservices were the gold standard, so the real-world project I led the development on had to be microservices. Almost a year in, when the cracks started forming, I took the decision to merge everything back into a modular monolith which improved DX by nearly 2x for my small team.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I was a REST purist. Then I shipped enough user-facing products to see that strict RESTful API design is a bottleneck when your domain is actions, not resources. Sometimes you just need POST /approve.

The same pattern repeated in many decisions that I had to backtrack on: MongoDB to PostgreSQL, Polyrepos to Monorepos, JWTs to plain old sessions.

That's not to say that there aren't uses for the things I've discarded. Microservices make sense when your teams need independent deployment cycles. JWTs have a clear place in stateless, distributed auth across services.

The unlearning wasn't about those tools being wrong but rather about me being wrong about when to reach for them. The engineering instinct is to learn more. I've found more leverage in questioning what I already think I know.