So, your service is humming along nicely. Everything’s perfect. Your metrics are green. Your team’s morale is higher than your infrastructure budget. And then—BAM—traffic spike. Suddenly you’ve got 10x the normal load, your database connections are maxed out, and your logs look like a coffee shop during finals week: chaotic, loud, and nobody knows what’s happening anymore. This is where backpressure enters the chat, and honestly, it’s one of those concepts that sounds intimidating but is actually just your system politely asking for a timeout instead of accepting everything and imploding spectacularly....
There’s a peculiar cycle in tech where something new arrives, and suddenly everyone who isn’t using it feels personally attacked. GraphQL arrived about a decade ago, and we’ve been watching the echo chamber ever since. “REST is dead,” they said. “GraphQL is the future,” they proclaimed. Meanwhile, REST APIs quietly powered 90% of the internet and went about their business unbothered. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not here to tell you GraphQL is bad....
The Refactoring Paradox Nobody Talks About You’ve heard it a thousand times: “Write unit tests! They’re your safety net! They give you confidence to refactor!” And you know what? That’s absolutely true. Except when it’s not. There’s a peculiar moment in every developer’s career when they discover that their test suite—the very thing that was supposed to liberate them—has become a pair of concrete boots. You need to refactor a class, extract a method, reorganize your module structure, and suddenly half your tests start breaking....
The Uncomfortable Truth Nobody Wants to Hear Let me start with something that will make your Twitter timeline combust: junior developers writing tests is like letting someone learn to drive by driving a school bus during rush hour. Sure, they’ll probably survive, and maybe even learn something. But is that really the best use of everyone’s time and sanity? I can already hear the collective gasp from the test-driven development zealots, the agile evangelists, and the “everyone should code review everything” crowd....
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