List the 5 most important things that you learned in the course, and why you chose them.

Were there topics would you like to see added or deleted from this course? 

1. Micro service architecture - Professionally I've only used giant monolithic architecture but, I know distributed micro services is very common (and difficult!!)

2. Message Services (RabbitMQ) - Part of my missing understanding of the micro service architecture was how each micro service communicates with pub/sub.

3. I think having a giant monolith like Meta is honestly the way to go. Having one controller just handle everything without sending messages out to various micro services just seems way more efficient and less confusing. Need another feature? Just make another function easy.

4. From my experience; even at the largest organizations nobody strictly follows Waterfall or Agile development. If managers try to enforce their will upon the developers the only thing that will get built is a toxic environment.

That being said there are a lot of good ideas to be implemented from both strategies.

5. Spring Boot - I have used spring boot before but, I've got a better sense of the structure with the DTOs and such. Still would not be my framework of choice but, that's okay! I understand why people still choose it to this day.



I would recommend finding some excuse to add a redis cache to the stack. It seems just as common to see redis as RabbitMQ these days. Different use cases for sure but, I think students would benefit from understanding redis in 2026+.