2013 was a growth year—not just in traffic, but in architecture maturity. Here’s a candid list of calls I made that aged well (and some that didn’t):
✅ Right:
- Decoupling ingestion and processing via queues
- Introducing retries + dead-letter queues
- Using schema-based events
❌ Wrong:
- Overengineering early microservices
- Delaying schema validation on input
- Underestimating operational toil in scale testing
Each decision taught me something about resilience, observability, and developer velocity. These are the lessons I carry forward.