How building a portable escape room made me a better microservices developer - William Brander

Service boundaries should align with business rules to keep complexity encapsulated and maintain simpler consistency boundaries

When monitoring distributed systems, consider:

• The area (infrastructure, application, capability)
• The concern (health, performance, capacity)
• The interaction type (passive, reactive, proactive)

Queue length alone is not enough for monitoring - also consider processing time, critical time, and message age in queue

The messaging bridge pattern allows integrating different messaging technologies (like MQTT and RabbitMQ) without either system needing to know about the other

Keep aggregate roots simple and well-defined around clear business capabilities rather than technical boundaries

State machines (like the escape room run controller) can manage complex flows while keeping individual components simple and focused

Use polyglot messaging to let each component use the most appropriate messaging technology for its needs

Service boundaries should be defined by verbs (actions/capabilities) rather than nouns (entities)

When modernizing legacy systems, use messaging bridges to gradually migrate components without big-bang rewrites

Monitoring should provide actionable insights beyond basic health checks - look for patterns and trends that indicate potential issues