There is a genre of blog post where someone explains that they moved off microservices and everything got better. Those posts are usually right. If you are building a product and your only goal is to ship it, a modular monolith will beat what I am about to describe on almost every measure that matters: build time, deploy time, cognitive load, your evenings.
I am doing the opposite anyway, and I want to be precise about why — because "learning" is the kind of reason people give when they have not actually thought about the trade.
The four goals, in order
Stallora is a multi-vendor commerce platform: a Next.js storefront, a Flutter app, an admin panel, and a backend split into a gateway plus five services. I build it about ten hours a week, alone. It has four goals, and I ranked them before writing any code:
Learn how distributed systems are actually run in production.
