Ask most developers these days “Which is better: Monolith or Microservices?” you will likely receive a prompt and definitive “Microservices. Hands down.” The term monolith has become a pejorative; a four-letter word in software architecture circles. The folk-wisdom criticisms are not entirely undeserved, after all there are a lot of bad monoliths out there; unmaintainable, untestable, brittle to the point of personifying a Jenga tower of code. Many (perhaps most) non-trivial monoliths in the wild today could be classified as a Big Ball of Mud. I submit that most criticisms of monolithic software architecture would be more accurately targeted at Ball of Mud architectures. A monolithic deployment granularity doesn’t necessarily presage a Ball of Mud and furthermore, adopting a distributed architecture (such as microservices) does not automatically inoculate a system against evolving into a Ball of Mud.

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This is a talk that I have been privileged to see some early drafts of its development. I’ve been eagerly awaiting the finished product. Nimisha Asthagiri joins Scott Davis to lay out the vision of Solid and Pods. It is a delightfully protopian vision, and one that is eminently in reach.

In this talk, Nimisha and Scott explore Tim Berners-Lee’s new vision for the Web – Solid and Pods – where user data is “at the beck and call of the users themselves… a future in which [web] programs work for you”. This is an alternative path where privacy and resiliency are at the heart of our system architectures. A path where the web’s pendulum swings back to decentralization. A path that leads to a fundamentally user-centric tech ecosystem.

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This question, it would seem, has been answered countless times on countless blogs, articles, conference talks, papers, etc. yet here I am, joining the throng to tilt at this windmill.

My understanding of REST has been evolving continuously over the past 15+ years. I continue to find new nuances, new applications, new patterns, and rediscover concepts that I once completely misunderstood. I have brilliant friends and mentors, but I’m an autodidact at heart and more often than not, they merely illuminate the path. As I’ve sought to navigate this life and the information space we call the web, I have learned being self-taught is fraught with peril.

The web is full of contradictions.

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