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It Depends

Software architecture trade-offs and design decisions

t/it-depends

Architecture arguments with no clean answer. Monolith or services, SQL or document, REST or RPC — bring the trade-offs, not the verdict.

32 members
3 posts
Created Aug 2026

Community rules

3 rules for t/it-depends

  1. State your constraints first

    Team size, traffic, deadline. Advice without constraints is horoscopes for engineers.

  2. Bring the detail

    Versions, error text, what you already tried. "It does not work" is not a question anyone can answer.

  3. No drive-by self promotion

    Share your own work when it answers the thread. A link with no context is a advert, and it gets removed.

Top contributors

  1. Danny Cho#1 · 32 rep · 1 post
  2. Emeka Nwosu#2 · 32 rep · 1 post
  3. Siobhan O'Rourke#3 · 8 rep · 1 post
  4. Martín Ferraro#4 · 1 rep
  5. Bram Verhoeven#5 · 1 rep

Discussions

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  • It Depends

    The main discussion

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  • System design questions

    d/system-design-questions

    Architectural decisions, trade-offs, when to use what tech, and the boring questions nobody else wants to answer

    37 members

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Posts in t/it-depends

Siobhan O'Rourke97
t/it-depends

Contract testing across 12 services: is Pact worth it or overkill?

We have 12 services now (dont ask how, it happened over three years and two reorgs). The e2e suite is slow and flaky because it needs everything up at once, and the integration bugs we do catch are mostly "service A renamed a field and service B found out in production". Ive been reading about consumer driven contracts with Pact. Has anyone rolled it out across a bunch of teams? Specifically: did teams actually keep…

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