This has to be a crime.
For example, in order to sign up a user...the client hits the /signup endpoint, which first lands on the server-gateway service. Then that is passed along to an account-service which creates the user. Then the accounts-service hits a NATS messaging service twice - one message to send a verification email, and another to create a subscription. The messaging service passes the first message along to the verification-service, which sends out a sendgrid email. Then the second message gets passed along to a subscription-service-worker. The subscription-service-worker adds a job to a queue, which when it gets processed, hits the actual subscription-service, which sends along a request to Stripe to create the customer record and trial subscription.
6 services in order to sign up a user, in what could have been done with about 100-300 lines of Node.
At my very first programming job many years ago I was given a bunch of code written by a string of "previous guys" (mostly interns) over a period of 10 years or more and was told "good luck with it". I was the only developer, with no real technical oversight. It was my first "real" programming job, but I had been programming for many years already (mostly stuff for myself, open source stuff, etc, but never "real" production stuff).
In hindsight, I did some things that were clearly overcomplicated. I had plenty of time, could work on what I wanted, and it was fun to see if I could get the response speed of the webpage down from 100ms to 50ms, so I added a bunch of caching and such that really wasn't needed. Varnish had just been released and I was eager to try it, so I added that too. It was nowhere near the craziness you're describing though, and considering the state of the system when I took things over things were still massively improved, but I'd definitely do things different now because none of that was really needed.
Maybe if it had been today instead of 15 years ago I would have gone full microservice, too.
For some reason, even today, my personal projects tend to get very complex. But I think that’s just because I’m working on hard problems since they’re passion projects.
