Most newsletters give you a feed. You scroll, you read one, you forget.
This is different. Over 40 weeks, Tech Architect Insights has covered the real problems architects face in production: retry storms, data consistency gaps, service boundary mistakes, and decisions no one wrote down.
But reading them in order doesn't always make sense. Your next challenge isn't "Lesson #1." It's the thing keeping you up at night right now.
So I organized everything into four learning paths. Pick the one that matches where you are, read the lessons in sequence, and walk away with defaults you can apply this week.
Build systems that stay up at night without you.
You're starting to own production reliability. Pages wake you up. Retries cascade. "It works on my machine" doesn't help when the dashboard is red.
This path takes you from setting SLOs to building circuit breakers, bulkheads, and shadow traffic validation. Ten lessons, each one a concrete guardrail you can deploy.
You'll learn to:
Define SLOs and track error budgets your team actually uses
Set up timeout chains that don't melt under pressure
Diagnose and fix retry storms before they cascade
Validate changes with shadow traffic before any major cutover
Lessons
Minutes
Next step: When your services are reliable, make sure the data underneath is too. Continue to Path 2.
Stop "why is data different?" incidents. Permanently.
Your queries are slow, and you're not sure why. Events go missing between services. Someone added a cache and now you have two sources of truth. Sound familiar?
This path covers the data layer from indexes to the outbox pattern. Nine lessons that turn consistency from an accident into a deliberate design choice.
You'll learn to:
Audit and fix slow queries using index analysis
Implement the outbox pattern for reliable event publishing
Design cache layers with explicit staleness budgets
Write idempotent operations that survive retries and replays
Lessons
Minutes
Next step: Your data is solid. Now make sure the services around it are drawn in the right places. Continue to Path 3.
Draw boundaries that survive your next reorg.
You're splitting a monolith. Or maybe you already did, and now you have a distributed monolith that's worse. Every deploy touches three teams. Every change breaks something downstream.
This path teaches you to think in boundaries, not boxes. Eleven lessons on where to cut, when to merge back, and how team structure shapes everything.
You'll learn to:
Evaluate whether a service split is justified or premature
Diagnose distributed monolith symptoms and plan a merge-first strategy
Align service boundaries to team boundaries deliberately
Design for reversibility in every major decision
Lessons
Minutes
Next step: You can design systems. Now learn to communicate those decisions so they stick. Continue to Path 4.
The architecture that stays in your head helps no one.
You have opinions about the system. Strong ones, probably. But when you try to explain why the team should change direction, eyes glaze over. Decisions get revisited. Context gets lost. Six months later, no one remembers why you chose Kafka over RabbitMQ.
This path is about the human side of architecture. Ten lessons on how to communicate decisions, run reviews, and write things down so future-you doesn't have to guess.
You'll learn to:
Run a 30-minute architecture review with your team
Write ADRs that capture the "why" behind every decision
Present tradeoffs clearly to stakeholders who aren't engineers
Build golden paths that encode good defaults across the org
Lessons
Minutes
Not sure where to start?
"I keep getting paged at night." Start with Path 1.
"Our queries are slow and data keeps getting out of sync." Start with Path 2.
"We split into microservices and now everything is harder." Start with Path 3.
"I have the technical skills but struggle to influence decisions." Start with Path 4.
"I'm brand new to architecture thinking." Start with Path 4, then do Path 3. That combination covers the mindset and the design principles. Come back for Paths 1 and 2 when you're closer to production ownership.
Every week, I publish one new lesson on a real architecture problem: concrete failure modes, measurable outcomes, and defaults you can copy. No fluff.
Or start with the free 5-day crash course: From Developer to Architect — five focused lessons on mindset, tradeoffs, and communication.
These paths are built from 40 weekly issues of Tech Architect Insights, written by Bogdan Colța. Every lesson is grounded in 17+ years of production experience. No theory without practice.