A Better React/Rails Architecture

A common refrain among us developers is that we spend a fantastic amount of our day sitting in front of the computer screen quietly, with our heads full of internal state. Here on the Styling team at Stitch Fix, we are lessening the amount of state a developer needs to have in their head at any given time by moving towards an application architecture that makes use of microservices and micro front ends, connected by a central API.As our applications grow and become more complex, it gets harder and harder to keep track of all of the mental threads required to solve the problems at hand. Just as our mental load grows, so does the heaviness of our development environment. Writing our tests becomes harder, and running them is potentially slower, too. CI and deploy times creep up. If multiple teams are involved in building a single application, our monolith runs the risk of becoming even more intimidating to new contributors, and we have to lean heavily on human communication to fill in the gaps.