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In a microservice system, the only real way to know how resilient you are is to break things on purpose and watch what happens. That’s the idea behind chaos engineering. Netflix’s Chaos Monkey is the famous example: it randomly kills services in production so the team finds out early whether the system can take it. Killing live services is overkill for most teams, especially outside production, but the underlying idea is worth borrowing. So we added a small piece of middleware to one of our services: a manually triggered, route-level failure tool that acts like a baby Chaos Monkey. ...

Designing clear, well-documented web APIs is a big part of building software. The most widely adopted standard for describing RESTful APIs is OpenAPI, a machine-readable format (usually JSON or YAML) that defines an API’s structure, endpoints, and request and response shapes. That schema becomes the single source of truth behind your interactive docs, client libraries, and server stubs. However, writing and maintaining OpenAPI specifications by hand can quickly become a chore. The syntax is verbose, and small mistakes in the structure can lead to frustrating bugs or inconsistencies across different parts of the system. ...

Our App was created in 2017. It is a React application written in TypeScript. At the time, TypeScript was gaining popularity, but strict type safety wasn’t a major concern for most teams. Our knowledge of TypeScript was limited, and the primary goal was to use it for basic type annotations rather than enforcing a fully type-safe codebase. As a result, strict mode was never turned on. The codebase ran without the safeguards strict mode brings: strict null checks, no implicit any, and tighter type inference. As the project grew, that gap started to cost us. Subtle bugs slipped through, and refactoring carried more risk than it should have. ...