Nothing Shared, Everything Gained: Boring Scales

Every few years our industry discovers a new way to make software development complicated.

Microservices that turn debugging into distributed archaeology. Event sourcing for applications that could use three database tables. Domain-Driven Design applied as cargo cult to a CRUD app with twelve entities. Kubernetes for a service that handles fifty requests per minute.

I've spent twenty years building web applications. The bottleneck was never PHP. It was always databases, external services, and third-party APIs. The infrastructure was never the problem. The code structure was.

This is not popular to say, but most web applications are not technically interesting. They accept requests, apply some logic, read and write data, and return responses. The interesting part is the domain, the users, the product. Spend your innovation tokens there — not on your backend architecture.

"Nothing Shared, Everything Gained" is deliberately boring. Four layers, strict dependency direction, stateless services. It works for a team of five and it works for a team of seventy. It handles 25x traffic spikes. It survived an acquisition. It needs no conference talks to explain.

The book uses PHP because that's what I know best. But the foreword is by Jan Lehnardt — Apache CouchDB chair, hasn't used PHP in years — and he says the ideas translated immediately to his current work.

Boring scales. Clever doesn't.

Get the book at codethatships.com.