The UUID Microservice Team

Funny story no one will believe, but it’s true. A good friend of mine joined a startup as CTO 10 years ago, high growth phase, maybe 200 devs... In his first week he discovered the company had a microservice for generating new UUIDs. One endpoint with its own dedicated team of 3 engineers ... including a database guy (the plot thickens). Other teams were instructed to call this service every time they needed a new ‘safe’ UUID. My pal asked wtf. It turned out this service had its own DB to store every previously issued UUID. Requests were handled as follows: it would generate a UUID, then ‘validate’ it by checking its own database to ensure the newly generated UUID didn’t match any previously generated UUIDs, then insert it, then return it to the client. Peace of mind I guess. The team had its own kanban board and sprints.

A software engineer describes an absurd startup architecture where a dedicated team and database exist solely to generate UUIDs and check that they are unique. The joke is that UUIDs are already designed to be practically unique, making the elaborate microservice, database, kanban board, and sprints hilariously overengineered. People share it as a reaction to pointless bureaucracy, excessive abstraction, or ridiculous enterprise software design.

• @dev_meme / 8284 2026-07-24