Stage 7 · Master
Retrospective
Current State Versus the Original Plan
An honest architecture review of what Meridian has already decided, what the scaffold has validated, and which major choices remain intentionally open.
Why a Retrospective Now
A retrospective does not require a finished product. It requires enough concrete work that some architectural choices are now evidence-backed while others remain hypotheses. Meridian is still in its scaffolding phase, so this chapter is not a postmortem of a shipped platform. It is a decision review: what the repository has already committed to, what that commitment buys, and which major design questions are still deliberately unresolved.
Decisions Already Validated
| Area | Current decision | Why it is already justified |
|---|---|---|
| Repository structure | go.work from day one across four service modules plus libs/platform | The workspace makes service boundaries explicit early and lets shared code evolve without local replace chaos. |
| Shared platform library | config, logging, errors, response, tenancy in libs/platform | These are cross-cutting conventions that would be duplicated immediately if each service invented them independently. |
| Multi-tenancy model | shared-schema isolation with tenant_id on every tenant-scoped table | The model is simple to reason about, matches the documentation, and fits the platform's early stage better than per-tenant schema explosion. |
| Network boundary | gateway as the single public entrypoint | README.md and docs/architecture/services.md already align on this rule, which simplifies future auth, tenant resolution, and rate limiting. |
Where the Plan Is Still Open
Several important questions remain open on purpose. The code today uses net/http and the standard ServeMux; Gin is mentioned only as a possible future upgrade path. reporting-service is documented as planned but does not yet exist, so its event contracts and storage design are not settled. The shared-schema tenancy model is the current choice, but it has not yet been pressured by production-scale data volume or tenant-isolation regulation. These are not weaknesses in the repository. They are examples of disciplined deferral.
- Whether net/http remains sufficient or a framework such as Gin eventually earns its complexity cost.
- How reporting-service should consume and aggregate events once there is real transactional data to summarize.
- Whether shared-schema tenancy remains the right long-term model once scale, compliance, and operational isolation demands grow.
- How far shared libraries should extend before they become coupling rather than leverage.
What the Scaffold Proves
Even a healthz-only scaffold proves several useful things. Every module builds on Go 1.26. The Makefile already encodes the correct workspace-wide test and vet pattern using explicit full import paths. The gateway's config struct already models downstream service URLs, which means the intended topology is reflected in code, not only in prose. The shared logging package already tags each service with a service attribute, which establishes an operational convention before the first real incident demands one.
What Has Not Been Proved Yet
The scaffold does not yet prove database access patterns, auth flows, event publication, Kubernetes rollout behavior, or production operations. Those lessons are still design chapters because the corresponding code and infrastructure do not exist in the reference repo. The honest retrospective conclusion is therefore narrow: the foundational architecture is coherent, but the next phase must validate data access, HTTP contracts, deployment mechanics, and operational feedback loops before stronger claims can be made.
The most expensive mistake in an early backend is pretending every choice is final. Meridian's scaffold is strongest where it establishes clear boundaries without forcing premature certainty about framework, eventing, or long-term storage evolution.
Mark this lesson complete to store local progress and unlock a cleaner resume path the next time you visit.