Scaling isn’t about microservices.
It’s about boundaries, ownership, and failure isolation.
You can scale a monolith. You can also destroy a system with Kubernetes.

ORMs are great until they hide your database.
If you can’t explain the generated SQL, you’re not using an ORM—you’re gambling.

Unit tests don’t catch architecture problems.
Integration tests don’t catch product bugs.
Only production traffic reveals reality.
The trick is deciding which layer deserves attention first.