Best Practices for Product Layer Development

A Scalable and Maintainable Approach

Tags: Tech

Following are the best practices that I learned by doing. Every point added here was offered as solution to some scalability & maintainable problem in the past for the tech product/s we were serving.

Core Design & Stability

Build core logic on the abstraction layer rather than directly on third-party API responses. This ensures modularity and easier change management.
Implement state-machine (SM) at the core logic. A system could have multiple SMs. This ensures deterministic control over lifecycle flows.
Think of locking where there is race or critical-region. This prevents concurrency bugs and maintains data integrity.
There should be a separate DB layer with a common entry & exit gate for future extensions. This isolates persistence logic and eases changes like DB migration or sharding.
Avoid cron jobs, scripts, or parallel systems consuming the same database or repeating business logic. Direct DB access should be avoided. This eliminates risk of logic duplication or unsynchronized operations.
Versioning must be implemented for APIs, events and internal modules. This enables backward compatibility and smoother rollouts of breaking changes.

Maintainability & Extensibility

There must be common gates (entry/exit) for API handlers. This centralizes authentication, validation, and logging.
Common utility/modules/libraries should be reused via a shared codebase. Avoid re-writing. Promotes Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principles and consistent behavior.
Maintain event queues for other services to collect or consume. This decouples services and supports async communication.
Unit testing should be mandatory for all core modules and components. This builds confidence during refactors and CI/CD pipelines.
Monitoring should be integrated at the service level for metrics, errors, and performance. This enables observability, alerting, and system health tracking.

Operational Enhancements

Logging levels should be centrally managed, with options to enable logs for specific modules or sub-modules. This helps in targeted debugging without bloating logs.
Documentation is a must; it extends the life of the code. This Aids onboarding and transitions; especially useful post-MVP phase.

While time constraints in v1 or first drop may lead us to skip some, we must eventually address them. These principles are critical for building a stable and scalable product.

Happy Coding.

Tags: Tech
Updated on: 2025-05-24