Building Micro-Frontends

Preface

At the beginning of December 2016, I took my first trip to Tokyo. It lasted just a week but, as I would discover, I would need to travel to the Japanese capital many more times in the following weeks. I clearly remember walking to the airplane at London Heathrow and mentally preparing my to-do list for the impending 12-hour flight. By now I’d been traveling for a couple of weeks on the opposite side of the world: attending conferences in the San Francisco Bay Area and then another event in Las Vegas.

The project I was working on at that time was an over-the-top platform similar to Netflix, but dedicated to sports, with daily live and on-demand content available in multiple countries and on more than 30 different devices (web, mobile, consoles, set-top boxes, and smart TVs). It was near the end of the year, and as a software architect, I had to make a proposal for a new architecture that would allow the company to scale to hundreds of developers distributed in different locations, without reducing the current throughput and enhancing it as much as I could.

When I settled in my seat, I became relatively calm. I was still tired from the Vegas trip and a bit annoyed about the 12 hours I would have to spend on the airplane, but I was excited to see Japan for the first time. A few minutes later, I had my first glass of champagne. For the first time in my life, I was in business class, with a very comfortable seat and a lot of space for working.

At the end of the first hour, ...