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❌ Why Microservices Are Hurting More Teams Than Helping

❌ Why Microservices Are Hurting More Teams Than Helping

What AI can’t replace, when microservices hurt, and why React updates matter

Journals GG
December 15, 2025

Hey there.

Welcome to Full Stack Focus. 👋

Here’s everything you need to know this week in the world of full-stack development.

We’ll be taking a break over the Christmas period, we’ll be back early January! 🎅

Happy Holidays! 🎄

Programming

😓 Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
This article argues that modern software naming has completely lost clarity, favoring clever or quirky names over ones that actually explain what a tool does. Using examples from Emacs, infrastructure libraries, and other engineering disciplines, it shows how meaningless names create a real cognitive tax for developers.

💼 Traits of a good Tech Lead
This article breaks down what actually makes a great Tech Lead, clearly separating the role from an Engineering Manager and focusing on impact over titles. It frames the TL as a multiplier, responsible for architecture, quality, and mentorship, with a strong emphasis on not becoming a bottleneck. You’ll get concrete signals of good vs harmful TL behavior, from RFCs and PoCs to setting explicit operating principles that increase team velocity. If you want a practical, experience-backed model for leading technically without centralizing decisions, this is a valuable read.

🤖 AI Can Write Your Code. It Can’t Do Your Job.
This piece pushes back on the idea that AI is replacing software engineers, arguing instead that it’s only automating programming tasks, not the job itself. Using examples like OpenAI’s attempted Windsurf acquisition and Anthropic buying Bun, it shows that AI leaders are spending billions to acquire engineers, not replace them. The article reframes engineering as judgment, context, trade-offs, and decision-making, with code being just one tool. If you’re anxious about AI and your career, this is a grounded, reassuring read that clarifies where real engineering value lives.

❌ The Case Against Microservices
This article makes a strong, pragmatic case against premature microservices, arguing that most teams adopt them for the wrong reasons: career incentives, status, and misplaced ideas of “scale.” It shows how well-designed monoliths can handle far more load than people assume, with lower cost, complexity, and cognitive overhead. The piece reframes microservices as a tool for very specific organizational and technical problems, not a default architecture. If you’ve ever felt pressure to “add boxes to the diagram” instead of delivering value, this is a sharp reality check worth reading.

🆕 ChatGPT 5.2 Tested: How Developers Rate the New Update
This article breaks down what’s actually new in ChatGPT 5.2, focusing on how developers rate it in real-world coding, reasoning, and productivity tasks. It covers benchmarks, pricing trade offs, and hands on developer feedback, highlighting clear gains in debugging, long-running tasks, and complex reasoning, alongside concerns about speed, guardrails, and reliability on simple logic. The key takeaway is that 5.2 is a meaningful upgrade for assisted development, but not a replacement for senior judgment.

Front-End

🚨 More React Server Component security issues found, immediate update recommended
The React team disclosed new high-severity security vulnerabilities in React Server Components, including Denial of Service and source code exposure, discovered while probing last week’s critical fix. Several recently released patches were incomplete, meaning even teams who already updated must upgrade again to 19.0.3, 19.1.4, or 19.2.3. The post clearly explains who is affected, why RSC apps are at risk, and which packages to update immediately. If you run React Server Components in production, this is a must-read to avoid outages or accidental source leaks.

🤝 Useful patterns for building HTML tools
This article is a practical deep dive into building single-file “HTML tools” using plain HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, heavily assisted by LLMs. Simon shares concrete patterns learned from shipping 150+ tools, covering everything from avoiding React, using CDNs, persisting state in URLs and localStorage, to leveraging CORS APIs, WebAssembly, and Pyodide. It’s packed with real examples, trade-offs, and workflows that prioritize speed, portability, and copy-paste simplicity. If you want to build useful tools fast without a build step or framework overhead, this is gold.

🥶 The edge caching trick that eliminated cold starts for 72M page views
This article breaks down how Mintlify eliminated cold starts for 72M monthly page views by building a custom edge caching architecture on Cloudflare. It explains how they decoupled deployments from cache invalidation using Workers, KV, Durable Objects, and Queues, pushing cache hit rates to effectively 100%.

📖 A practical guide to designing components developers can ship
This article is a deep, practical guide to designing JS-friendly UI components that translate cleanly from Figma to React, Vue, Angular, and Svelte. It breaks component design down into four fundamentals, structure, properties, design tokens, and interactions, showing how Auto-Layout maps to CSS, props map to real APIs, and tokens enable scalable theming. The focus is on reducing design-dev friction by speaking the same language as engineers. If you design components that developers struggle to implement, this piece shows exactly how to fix that.