How to build a monolith the right way

About this episode

The episode discusses the balance of tech stack choices and the implications of innovation in engineering with guest Ian Duncan from Mercury.

Share Episode                     We sit down with Ian Duncan, senior staff engineer on the stability team at Mercury, to discuss the delicate balance of choosing your tech stack and the implications. That means explore the concept of the novelty budget or frequently known as "Choose Boring Technology". It emphasizes why companies should carefully spend their innovation tokens on things that actually move the needle, rather than reinventing the wheel.           Mercury leverages simple technology like Postgres and EC2 instances alongside high-innovation bets like Haskell and Nix to maintain stability. The conversation unpacks the hidden complexities of over-relying on standard tools, sharing a cautionary tale about using a Postgres table as a massive queuing system until it consumed all the database resources and caused login failures. To solve architectural scaling without descending into nanoservice madness, we jump to discussing monolithic build systems. By leveraging hermetically sealed, modular build targets, teams can achieve massive…

People in this episode

Hosts: Will Button, Warren Parad

Guest: Ian Duncan

Topics covered

• tech stack selection
• monolithic build systems
• innovation management
• stability in engineering
• microservices
• durable execution frameworks

Keywords

• monolith
• tech stack
• innovation tokens
• Postgres
• EC2
• Haskell
• Nix
• microservices
• scaling
• Temporal

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Mercury

Products: Postgres, EC2, Haskell, Nix, Temporal

Books & works: Blah Blah Blah Using Innovation To

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