The $SILVER melt-up nobody is expecting

$Silver to $70

You're paying $8,000/month for RDS when a $400/month dedicated server with proper backups would be faster, more reliable, and 20x cheaper. But sure, keep telling yourself you're "cloud-native" while your database performance is trash and your bills are through the roof.

if you were wealthy enough to never work again, would you pursue more wealth and status games or would you opt out?

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.

less than half a person per service

less than half a person per service

Never do microservices at startups kids. I’ve never seen it end well.

At a past company, the head of engineering and the principal engineers decided to break our Ruby on Rails application into a Go microservices mesh. They created very detailed design documents and architecture diagrams. They went all out and used Kubernetes, gRPC, service templates, the whole shebang. The whole senior engineering leadership came from Amazon, where they were used to each team owning a distinct service. They tried to apply that model directly. But our issues were with code ownership and poor domain modeling. The entire application could have run on just a handful of EC2 instances. What was the result? Five years later, 70% of the application is still running on the Ruby on Rails monolith. Never completed the migration. But now they have to maintain two systems. None of the original leadership works there anymore.

$Silver to $70