There is no one general "good engineering". Everything is different. Labels suck because even if you called one thing "microservices", or even "monolith of microservices", I can show you 10 different ways that can end up. So "modular monolith" is just as useless a descriptor; it's too vague.

Outside of the HN echo chamber, good engineering practice has been happening for decades. Take open source for example. Many different projects exist with many different designs. The common thread is that if a project creates some valuable functionality, they tend to expose it both at the application layer and library layer. They know some external app will want to integrate with it, but also they know somebody might want to extend the core functionality.

I personally haven't seen that method used at corporations. If there are libraries, they're almost always completely independent from an application. And because of that, they then become shared across many applications. And then they suddenly discover the thing open source has been dealing with for decades: dependency.

If you aren't aware, there is an entire universe out there of people working solely on managing dependencies so that you, a developer or user, can "just" install software into your computer and have it magically work. It is fucking hard and complicated and necessary. If you've never done packaging for a distro or a language (and I mean 250+ hours of it), you won't understand how much work it is or how it will affect your own projects.

So yes, there are modular moniliths, and unmodular monoliths, and microservices, and libraries, and a whole lot of varied designs and use cases. Don't just learn about these by reading trendy blog posts on HN. Go find some open source code and examine it. Package some annoying ass complex software. Patch a bug and release an update. These are practical lessons you can take with you when you design for a corporation.

It is not that it could trigger a chain reaction resulting in a extinction event or something.

Oh wait, we are already in a extinction event, nevermind.

I think we need to try some form of renewable energy, like hydro power to fix this. First, we flood an area and turn all the biomass into methane... oh wait, that doesn't work either.

Maybe making every vehicle electric and then connecting them to an electric grid powered by natural gas and coal and driving them around for no reason so that tires produce millions of microplastic particles will surely remediate this.

I wonder what else can I do? Certainly working at an office, consuming a bunch of things I don't need, buying imported goods that use excessive packaging, throwing away food all the time, preferring refrigerated food over non-refrigerated food, preferring food that requires vast amounts of water and soil and traveling around the world in planes that have a carbon footprint equivalent to burning my trash for the entire year cannot possibly be good starting points to consider reducing my environmental impact. That would go against my positive self-reassuring mindset that I learned from TikTok.

Ah, but the economists say all those things are related to externalities so it's all good. We need to keep growing the economy and worry about those later. Helping humans become more prosper and multiply more will certainly mitigate the effects of humans becoming more prosper and multiplying. We are the most intelligent species for sure! Doubling our population at shortening intervals is a great idea and totally sustainable, there is nothing possibly wrong with that at all and our economic activities have no connection with what is happening to the environment!

The solution could be Terraforming other planets because we have been successful Marsforming Earth!