The First Brick
In the last five years I’ve been building microservices applications. It’s a wonderful architectural style for systems that need to scale, evolve, and survive failure. But—as Uncle Ben would say—“with great power comes great responsibility.” Microservices look elegant from the outside, but inside them live drivers, constraints, and trade-offs that shape every decision.
Building an application using this style just because it’s cool is a mistake. But there’s a paradox here: if you don’t build it, how do you learn how it behaves? How do you feel the pain points, understand the patterns, and discover what actually works?
That’s the proposition of this saga.
The only real way to understand microservices is to walk through a real project—one that is meaningful enough to behave like production, but fictional enough to let us bend, adapt, and reshape it as we learn.
Microservices don’t come with a “manual.” There’s no ISO-certified definition. What we do have are characteristics: independence, loose coupling, bounded context, fault isolation. Some implementations honor those principles. Others cut corners—like the infamous “shared database” pattern. It’s criticized today and labeled an anti-pattern, yet it still appears everywhere because reality is messy.
So, to explore the real world (and its imperfections), we need a living lab. A space where we can try approaches, break things safely, and validate architectural behaviors.
And that’s exactly why we’re creating HireFlow together.
HireFlow is a fictional hiring platform designed as a real microservices playground. It simulates a modern recruitment workflow—from companies creating jobs to candidates applying and moving through stages—giving us a safe laboratory to test architectural decisions, patterns, failures, and refactorings.
Through HireFlow we’ll iterate on the entire lifecycle of building a microservices system. We’ll discuss decisions, highlight trade-offs, evaluate alternatives, and let the architecture emerge from the forces that shape it.
Not top-down. Not imposed. Just evolving naturally through refactoring and learning.
This mirrors a key principle: emergent architecture.
Instead of designing the final form upfront, we allow the system to grow in response to its drivers. We adapt. We adjust. We watch how change propagates, and the architecture reveals itself.
Now, let’s ground the idea with a simple briefing—our initial view of what HireFlow must do.
Briefing — Desired Functional Outcomes
- A company can register and create open job positions.
- Recruiters can manage job listings, view candidates, and update stages.
- Candidates can apply by submitting personal information and a résumé.
- The system evaluates applications with a basic screening score.
- Recruiters can move candidates through the hiring pipeline (screening → interview → decision).
- Interview slots can be scheduled and notifications sent.
- Each step is traceable, auditable, and isolated to the service responsible for it.
- The full flow works even when parts of the system are degraded—embracing microservices behavior.
Okay—this is our starting point.
In the next post, we’ll talk about the solution outline and how to slice the problem into independent domains.
Then we dive into the tech.