Satire
We're Designing the Final Architecture First
The design took four months. The competitor shipped in week six.
A fintech startup is building a payments platform. The founding engineers agree they will do it right from day one: event-driven, hexagonally architected, CQRS, multi-region. Gall's Law is not on the whiteboard.
What Actually Happens
Quarter one is spent finalising the event schema. Quarter two on saga orchestration patterns. Quarter three on the exact shape of the aggregate boundaries. By quarter four, the team has a working demonstration of a single payment flow in a staging environment.
Their main competitor launched a Rails monolith in week six. They have two hundred paying customers. They are currently hiring a backend engineer to "clean up some of the original code."
The fintech startup presents at a conference about lessons learned designing a resilient event-driven payments platform. The talk is well-received. The product does not yet have paying customers.
“Your competitor's prototype became their product. Yours became a conference talk.”
DivineForge Advisory
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Let's talk architecture →How a Builder Should Respond
Ship the simplest system that correctly handles one real use case. The architecture you need for scale is not the architecture you need to discover whether the product is worth scaling. A simple system that works can evolve. A complex design that hasn't shipped cannot. Find the first working version, not the final right version.
This scenario illustrates Gall's Law. See all 13 laws →
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