We broke the monolith. We built independent pipelines. We created a custom Pub/Sub event bus. Our architecture was a masterpiece of Webpack 5 engineering. But a few months later, I had to ask: Did we sacrifice developer sanity at the altar of scale? A reflection on the true cost of microfrontends.
Microfrontends are great until they need to talk to each other. How do you pass data between two React apps that don't share a state tree? Redux? Context? No. We went back to basics and built a vanilla JavaScript Pub/Sub Event Bus. Here's why it works.
With our Webpack Module Federation setup, we gained a superpower: independent deployments. The Cart team could deploy on Tuesday, and the Product team on Friday. No coordination meetings. No monolithic release trains. Here's how we orchestrated our dynamic remotes.
Our React e-commerce app took 12 minutes to build, and teams were constantly stepping on each other's toes. We needed boundaries. Here is how we broke our monolith into microfrontends using Webpack 5 Module Federation, with a simple, practical example you can actually understand.
Cache::get(), Mail::send(), Auth::user() — they look like static methods, but they're not. Understanding facades and the service container unlocked how Laravel actually works under the hood.
My controllers were doing too much. Create order, send email, update inventory, notify warehouse, log analytics — all in one method. Events and listeners taught me to decouple, and suddenly everything was cleaner.