We live in an era of digital excess where developers are taught to believe that the goal of an API is to serve data. This is a fundamental fallacy that has cost billions in infrastructure and security around the world. We spent years debating REST versus GraphQL or gRPC versus WebSockets and forgot to look at the most elegant and performant solution that exists. I am speaking of the concept of No as a Service or NaaS (https://github.com/hotheadhacker/no-as-a-service).
For those who skipped the Starfleet Academy lectures, the Kobayashi Maru is a training exercise designed as a “no-win scenario.” The goal isn’t to win, it’s to see how you handle inevitable failure. In the world of Backend Engineering, our no-win scenario is the Unhandled Exception.
You spend weeks architecting a beautiful, clean service. You use Records, you optimize your SQL queries, you apply SOLID principles. And then, on production day, a user sends a malformed JSON, and your API vomits a 50-line Stack Trace directly into their browser console. It’s ugly, it’s unprofessional, and it exposes your internal logic to the world.
If you are a developer who has handled payroll processing or bank/financial reconciliation at a company that uses Spring, you have likely worked with Spring Batch. I confess I’m not a huge fan; it has that characteristic verbosity and overhead of the Java ecosystem, making it feel like even the simplest job requires far more structure than necessary. But what good is complaining? The technology your company uses is what ensures your survival (housing, food, clothing). So, whining isn’t the topic for today.
