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Architecture9 min read

The Architecture Decision Nobody Writes Down

We spend weeks choosing between Kafka and RabbitMQ but never document why. ADRs take 15 minutes and save months of 'why did we do this?' conversations.

By Jason TeixeiraDecember 20, 2025
ArchitectureDocumentationADRDecision MakingBest Practices
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Six months ago, I chose Supabase over Firebase for Nexural. I had good reasons — PostgreSQL, row-level security, self-hostable. But I almost forgot those reasons. The only thing that saved me from re-evaluating the same decision (and wasting a week) was a markdown file I wrote in 15 minutes.

The Problem

Every engineering team has this conversation:

"Why do we use RabbitMQ instead of Kafka?" "I think Dave chose it. Dave left 8 months ago." "..." "Should we switch to Kafka?"

And now you're spending a sprint re-evaluating a decision that was already evaluated. The institutional knowledge walked out the door.

Architecture Decision Records (ADRs)

An ADR is a short document that captures a significant decision. Mine are dead simple:

\\

Reader route

article -> proof -> offer

ReadClusterProofScope

cluster

Product Systems

intent

Architecture

route

next step

What to do with this

Turn the note into a build path.

If this topic maps to a real business problem, keep reading the cluster, study the academy path, or route the work into a scoped engagement.

Jason Teixeira
Written by
Jason Teixeira
Founder, Sage Ideas Studio · Principal Engineer
livebuild a1556e22026-06-19 03:29Z
// solo studio// no analytics resold// every commit human-reviewed