The Shape of Decoupling
There is a moment in every codebase where someone draws a box on a whiteboard, labels it EventBus, and draws arrows fanning out to every other box. The room nods. It looks like architecture. It looks like the right architecture — loosely coupled, extensible, the textbook answer to “how do we let many components react to one thing happening?” That diagram is a trap. I drew it for Moments, my photo manager, in late March 2026. I had the design reviewed by an external UI architect. I shipped it in April across six phased PRs. And on the third of May I deleted the whole thing in a single commit titled, with some satisfaction: ...