Hey Chris en Mike!
First, thanks for the awesome podcasts, I really enjoy listening to Coder Radio.
It's very relaxing to listen to and a fun way to stay up to date :)
In episode 292 Mike talked about his mythical macbook hipster working with microservices, mentioning that sometimes a "giant monolith" is the way to go.
I recently started a new job at a small financial startup and I am now working on a giant (GIANT) monolith, and started trying to push working towards a REST API.
First to work with an internal API and then slowly making it external so customers can start using it.
I am very much opposed to using monoliths since I think it makes writing bad code too attractive.
My current codebase has some terrible anti-patterns and bad practices which I commonly see in monoliths, but this happens less when I work with API codebases.
We are also bound to just our framework (Symfony), which makes using a front-end framework less accessible, effectively slowing down development.
My question with all this is, when would a monolith actually be useful?
The way I see it is that a backend framework can be used to create the endpoints, after which a frontend framework can be used to create a nice interface leveraging all the benefits available from both frameworks.
However, with only a Django/Rails/Symfony you are kind of stuck with.. just that, right?
I hope my question is clear!
Keep up the great shows! :)
Bart (or Infergo on IRC)
PS. Please do not think I like working with PHP. What a terrible language.