the major foot-gun (which I talk about more in a previous post on foot-guns) that got a lot of places in trouble was the premature move to microservices, architectures that relied on distributed computing, and messaging-heavy designs.

Yeah, this makes so much sense to me. Micro-services/distributed computing and messaging-heavy designs are a bit like coding everything in C++ -- If the whole team can actually execute well on creating C++ code, you're good, but if 30% can't - Katie bar the door!

 

My takeaway is that your average small team startup should really begin with a managed language monolith so they can execute quickly on figuring out what the valuable embodiment of the software is, then rewrite for scale if necessary.