The great thing about starting a new project is that you get a clean slate. No baggage of design choices that you hated to look at every day in your last project. But how many times have you seen a shiny new project not turning into the same intractable mess?

It is more likely to happen in a fast-paced startup. The faster the pace, the sooner it happens. So how do you balance moving fast without being trapped in analysis paralysis and keep technical debt at a manageable level?

You design for change. Ignore the refrain that prevention is better than cure. Instead of preventing the mess, you should embrace it and mitigate it when it happens. That’s what we have done at Slang Labs.

In this article, I discuss:

• Startup Reality: forces and constraints in a startup.
• Engineering Philosophy: our philosophy to manage that reality.
• Slang Architecture: evolution of Slang microservices and SDKs guided by our philosophy.

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