June 2022 was a month of stark contrasts. On one hand, we were seeing AI/ML platforms take center stage with ChatGPT’s resurgence and the ongoing hype around large language models (LLMs). On the other hand, companies were grappling with the fallout from Supreme Court decisions, such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which brought a whirlwind of emotions and discussions on privacy and autonomy that felt very real and close to home.

In the tech world, we saw shutdown announcements like “Tell HN: I’m Afraid We’re Shutting Down,” where people were sharing their struggles with legacy systems and unsustainable operations. These stories resonated deeply; they mirrored some of the challenges our own engineering teams faced when it came to maintaining old infrastructure in a cloud-first world.

During this time, FinOps was front and center as companies tightened belts due to cloud cost pressures. Every penny counted, and we found ourselves frequently optimizing costs by rearchitecting services or negotiating better deals with providers. The DevOps community was also actively adopting DORA metrics, which helped us measure our progress in continuous delivery and improve our release cadence.

One of the more interesting trends was WebAssembly on the server side. We had been experimenting with it to see if it could help offload some CPU-intensive tasks from our application servers. While it showed promise, we were still trying to find a compelling use case that would justify the complexity.

Platform engineering became mainstream as teams began recognizing the importance of building shared services and abstractions to support the broader organization. This shift was crucial for us, as we started to focus more on cross-functional collaboration and shared responsibilities among our teams.

One specific project I worked on involved debugging a particularly stubborn issue with one of our microservices. We were seeing sporadic 502 errors that seemed to be related to load balancing but couldn’t quite figure out the root cause. After hours of tracing through logs, we finally narrowed it down to an unexpected edge case in how the application handled certain requests during high traffic periods. Once we identified the issue, refactoring was straightforward, and the service has been stable ever since.

Another area I found myself wrestling with was developer experience (DX). As teams grew, DX became a critical factor for retention and productivity. We started investing more in tooling and automation to reduce manual steps and improve the onboarding process. It’s a continuous effort, but seeing new hires hit their stride faster made it all worthwhile.

The tech landscape continued to evolve with platform providers like AWS and Google Cloud releasing new features and services. At our company, we were evaluating whether to switch from one provider to another based on cost and performance considerations. The decision was complex, involving a thorough comparison of pricing models and the integration challenges that come with changing platforms.

In summary, June 2022 felt like a month where both the virtual and physical worlds were in flux. As I looked back on my projects and conversations during the month, I realized how much we had grown as an engineering team. We faced real-world challenges head-on, learned from our mistakes, and emerged stronger for it. That’s what makes this journey so rewarding.

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This post reflects a realistic mix of industry trends, personal experiences, and the broader tech landscape in June 2022.