Signs You’re Thinking Like an Architect, Not Just a Developer 1) You Think in Terms of Flows, Not Functions → You focus on how data, users, and events move across the system - not just isolated code. 2) You Optimize for Long-Term Change, Not Short-Term Speed → You prefer solutions that evolve cleanly over ones that ship fastest. 3) You Ask “What Happens If It Fails?” → Every design you touch includes fallback, retries, and graceful degradation. 4) You Embrace Constraints, Not Just Features → SLAs, latency budgets, cost limits - you design within them, not around them. 5) You Design for Team Boundaries, Not Just Code Boundaries → You think about ownership, autonomy, and deploy isolation. 6) You Think in Contracts and Interfaces → APIs and schemas are versioned, stable, and clearly defined - not “whatever works for now.” 7) You Separate What Changes from What Doesn’t → You isolate volatility to avoid ripple effects across the system. 8) You Question Dependencies Before Adding Them → You consider security, longevity, and upgrade paths before bringing in a library or service. 9) You Build for Observability Upfront → Logging, metrics, traces - your systems explain themselves during outages. 10) You Default to Asynchronous Where It Makes Sense → You understand that queues, jobs, and events scale better than sync chains. 11) You Care About Data Contracts → You treat schema changes, migrations, and backward compatibility as critical design elements. 12) You Minimize Coordination, Not Just Code → You design systems where teams don’t have to talk to ship independently. 13) You Think in Layers → Infra, business logic, interfaces, observability - all get their place in the design. 14) You Know Simplicity Is the Hardest Part → You don’t add complexity unless the problem requires it.
@theskilledcoder Worth to be added as an architect review checklist ✅