Inherited a simple marketplace website that matches job seekers and hospitals in healthcare. Typically, all you need for this sort of thing is a web server, a database with search

But the precious devs decided to go micro-services in a container and db per service fashion. They ended up with over 50 docker containers with 50ish databases. It was a nightmare to scale or maintain!

With 50 database for for a simple web application that clearly needs to share data, integration testing was impossible, data loss became common, very hard to pin down, debugging was a nightmare, and also dangerous to change a service’s schema as dependencies were all tangled up.

The obvious thing was to scale down the infrastructure, so we could scale up properly, in a resource driven manner, rather than following the trend.

We made plans, but the CTO seemed worried about yet another architectural changes, so he invested in more infrastructure services, kubernetes, zipkin, prometheus etc without any idea what problems those infra services would solve.

I once worked with an obsessive tester who was bent on ‘testing’ the README file of a Software Distribution.

The README text file was in the distribution zip, so she had to unzip the thing before reading the file, however she insisted that her test result was a failure because there was no README that shows her how to unzip the distro to read the README!

I thought she was joking, but she was dead serious and escalated the ‘issue’ to the manager! I was furious, almost resigned from the project

In the end I had to suck it up and tolerated more weeks of her mindless obsession!