Invent and Simplify: Problem Solved

Situation

At a previous role, our team was responsible for maintaining a legacy microservice that handled image transformations for thousands of user-uploaded assets. The system was complex, relied on multiple chained APIs, and was becoming a performance bottleneck, especially during peak traffic.

Engineers dreaded working on this service. It was fragile, undocumented, and prone to silent failures — yet critical to the user experience.

Task

I volunteered to lead an effort to both stabilize and improve this system. But I didn’t want to just patch it — I wanted to rethink it. My goal was to invent a solution that was simpler, more reliable, and scalable enough to handle future load growth.

Action

First, I audited all failure logs and traced the key bottlenecks. I discovered that 60% of failures were due to a chain of synchronous calls between our transformation API, a third-party image processor, and our CDN invalidation layer.

I proposed a redesigned pipeline based on the following simplifications:

• 📦 Replaced the legacy service with a stateless Lambda function
• 🧠 Used Amazon S3 event triggers to kick off processing jobs automatically
• 🪄 Integrated Sharp.js for image ops — smaller, faster, and self-contained
• 📊 Added structured CloudWatch logging + Datadog metrics for full observability

// Example: AWS Lambda handler
  exports.handler = async (event) => {
    const file = event.Records[0].s3.object.key;
    const image = await S3.getObject({ Bucket, Key: file }).promise();
    const resized = await sharp(image.Body).resize(1024).toBuffer();
    await S3.putObject({ Bucket: 'output-bucket', Key: file, Body: resized }).promise();
  };
      

I built a working MVP in 3 days and demoed it to my manager. Once approved, I coordinated phased rollout behind a feature flag and ran performance benchmarks in staging.

Result

The simplified architecture reduced processing latency by 85%, cut error rates to near-zero, and required zero manual intervention post-launch. Engineering time spent on this service dropped from ~6 hours/week to under 15 minutes/month. This solution was later adopted by two other teams with similar workloads.

It was cited during my annual review as one of the highest-leverage projects I’d led that year. I was also asked to present the design at our internal engineering summit.

Reflection

• 💡 Simplicity doesn't mean less — it means fewer moving parts with higher reliability.
• 🚀 Invention often starts by asking: "If we were building this today, how would we do it?"
• 🔁 I built in observability from day one — which made trust in the new system easier to earn.
• 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Good invention spreads — two other teams adopted the solution without me being involved.

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