You say that every monolith you’ve seen has devolved into bad engineering — coupling, crossing boundaries. What was missing that could have stopped this? A missing service boundary you’d say, but also a lack of engineering leadership or lack of others’ experience? No code review? A commercial non-founder CEO pushing for results at the expense of codebase serviceability? Using a low-ceremony language (no types, no interfaces)?
You can stop coupling by enforcing boundaries. Repository boundaries are extremely solid ones. Too solid for some people, making it unnecessarily hard to coordinate changes on either side of the boundary. Barely solid enough for others, where it’s clearly too dangerous to let their devs work without solid brick walls keeping their hackers apart.
Coupling, smudged boundaries, and incoherence are symptoms of something more fundamental than simply we didn’t use services like we should have. If everyone’s getting colds off each other it’s because of bad hygiene in the office. Sure, you could force them to remain in their cubicles or stay at home but you could also teach them to wash their hands!
You can stop coupling by enforcing boundaries. Repository boundaries are extremely solid ones. Too solid for some people, making it unnecessarily hard to coordinate changes on either side of the boundary. Barely solid enough for others, where it’s clearly too dangerous to let their devs work without solid brick walls keeping their hackers apart.
Coupling, smudged boundaries, and incoherence are symptoms of something more fundamental than simply we didn’t use services like we should have. If everyone’s getting colds off each other it’s because of bad hygiene in the office. Sure, you could force them to remain in their cubicles or stay at home but you could also teach them to wash their hands!