Boring Components Are GOAT for System Design

Good system design relies on simple, well-tested components and avoids unnecessary complexity, making systems reliable and self-effacing.

Services should minimize statefulness by centralizing write logic in one service and keeping others stateless, while optimizing databases with flexible schemas, targeted indexes, and read replicas.

Slow operations should be offloaded to background jobs and caches used judiciously, events and push/pull patterns applied appropriately, and hot paths monitored with robust logging, metrics, retries, and fail-safe mechanisms.