Top 5 DEV Comments from the Past Week

Start with a Monolith, break into services when it starts to hurt.

Staying with a Monolith when it's causing you pain is bad.

Starting with Microservices without a good idea of where your pain will be is also bad.

As is usually the case, nuance is what's most important here. Both are great, and bad. Picking the right great, and bad, is totally subjective.

In general, for scale, logically breaking things into small-ish pieces is a great idea. Keeping their data isolated is also a great idea. Communicating between services asynchronously is yet another great idea.

Note that none of the above are owned entirely by the Microservices umbrella. You can do a lot of it without breaking your monolith up at all.

For context, my current situation: We need to rewrite and rearchitect a very large, and old, monolith. Here we already know what hurts from years of development experience, so we start with a good idea of what needs to sit in isolation. We also know that we have really ambitious delivery goals, a very large team of technologists (100+), and need teams and services to be able to work and deploy with as few dependencies as possible.

This is the type of situation the concept of Microservices was created to enable. So, like a cat on the internet, if I fits, I sits.

This if statement

  if(!isNotUnset) {
    return null
  }

is called a guard clause like you mentioned it's a way to reduce if else blocks. In the end, it makes your code cleaner and easier to read.

As spread operator acts as if we used String[Symbol.iterator], it is better to use spread operator instead of regular String.prototype.split to split given string into characters when the string may involve Unicode characters. It's not foolproof, but better.
For example,

"😂👻".split("") // (4) ["�", "�", "�", "�"] <- wut?
[..."😂👻"] //  2) ["😂", "👻"]

So, if you get asked to reverse a string with JS in an interview, following might be treated as too naive:

function reverse(str) {
  return str.split('').reverse().join('');
}
reverse('foo') // "oof"
reverse('𝄞') // "��"

Following is slightly better:

function reverse(str) {
  return [...str].reverse().join('');
}
reverse('foo') // "oof"
reverse('𝄞') // "𝄞"

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