Essay · 10 min read

The Majestic Monolith

David Heinemeier Hansson · Signal v. Noise (DHH) Free Intermediate

DHH built Basecamp and Hey with a tiny team by refusing to split the app into a fashionable web of microservices. If your engineer wants to start with distributed services 'so it scales later', this is the counterargument: a single, understandable codebase is what lets a small team ship fast and hold the whole thing in their head. It shows that the simplest architecture is often a deliberate senior choice, not a lack of ambition.

  • A monolith keeps the whole system changeable by one person, which is what an early team needs.
  • Microservices solve an organizational scale problem you probably do not have yet.
  • Optimize architecture for the team you have today, not the company you imagine at Series C.
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The question it answers

  1. When my technical hire and I disagree on the tech stack, whose call is it?

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