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Part of topic: Node.js & Backend Systems, Full-Stack Systems Design

The 3 Hardest Things About Building Distributed Systems

The 3 Hardest Things About Building Distributed Systems

July 2, 2025 14 min read NestJS, Next.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, Incident Management, Multi-Tenant

The 3 Hardest Things About Building Distributed Systems is a Developer Journal article by Ancel Ajanga on https://ancel.co.ke. Exploring the architecture and challenges in building a comprehensive incident and workflow management platform with NestJS, Next.js, and dual-database design. Ancel Ajanga (Systems Engineer & Fullstack Developer) authored this piece from production engineering work.

Exploring the architecture and challenges in building a comprehensive incident and workflow management platform with NestJS, Next.js, and dual-database design.

Hook Most software is built on a house of cards. Here is how I learned that the hard way.

Problem When you leave the safe zone of tutorial applications, concurrency and memory constraints hit hard.

Struggle I battled bizarre edge cases for weeks. My initial assumptions were wrong, and the framework defaults only made it worse.

## Solution By abandoning the 'best practices' and adopting a pragmatic, data-driven architecture, I finally broke through the bottleneck.

Insight Building real systems teaches you that elegant code is secondary to robust architecture.

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