Ok, so I have to first preface this whole blog post by a few things:

1. I really struggle with the term microservices. I can’t put my finger on exactly why. Maybe because the term is hopelessly ill-defined, maybe because it’s gotten picked up by the hype train. Whatever. But I have to stick to some type of terminology so let’s just roll with it.
2. This blog post might be mildly controversial, but I’m throwing it out there because I’ve had this itchy feeling for so long and I can’t get rid of it. I respect it if you want to disagree vehemently, and maybe there’s something both of us can learn.
3. I have a weird story. My first “real” company, Spotify, used a service-oriented architecture from scratch. I also spent some time at Google which used a service-oriented architecture. So basically since 2006 I’ve been continuously working in what people now call a “microservice architecture”. It didn’t even occur to me that some people might want to build things as monoliths. So I guess I’m coming at it from a different direction than many other. Either way, there were particular non-standard reasons why Spotify and Google had to do this that I’ll get back to later.

Let’s start by talking about iteration speed!

I have done roughly 2,000 interviews in my life. When I started recruiting, I had so much confidence in my ability to assess people. Let me just throw a couple of algorithm questions at a candidate and then I’ll tell you if they are good or not!

I started writing this blog in late 2012, partly because I felt like it would help me improve my English and my writing skills, partly because I kept having a lot of random ideas in my head and I wanted to write them down somewhere. I honestly never cared too much about finding a particular niche, I just wanted to write down stuff that I found interesting. I set up a Wordpress blog on my crappy Swedish virtual private server.

Turns out having a toddler isn’t super compatible with reading. I used to read ~100 books/year as a teenager, but it has slowly deteriorated to maybe 20-30 books, at most. And I don’t even finish all of them because life is too short! Some books are just not that interesting. So what were some of the books worth mentioning?

I spent six years at a company that went from 50 people to 1500 and one contributing factor leading to my departure was that I went from a “maker” to a person stuck in meetings every day. It wasn’t that I wanted to do that, but everyone else kept dragging me into meetings.