alt Hacker NewsSoftware design/architecture is a strange beast. It feels that if you want to learn it, you should spend time in legacy systems and large codebases of rewrite a project 3 times to explore counterfactuals. A lot of books on the subjects are abstract and give such simple examples, they are useless.
It's really hard to provide proper guidance on software architecture, because the fundamental deployment strategies differ for each project. For web projects, a lot of people will say Cloud is the best way to deploy, so now you're forced to build your whole project in a "Cloud friendly" architecture.
When I was learning and being formally educated I regularly only had like 50 bucks to my name, I couldn't even afford the cheapest VPS I could find. So for me learning the architectural ideas of using AWS services where you have to setup credit card information to even register was not feasible. After all I already had a computer, why not learn how to deploy from there? Especially after reading about horror stories of people racking up huge cloud bills due to some slip up. So AWS was out of the window. Next I got myself a book about Microservices which was popular at the time, but quickly learned that they are about organizational structure rather than software architecture, so I never had a reason to try that architecture.
I still have no idea how to chose the right architecture or make the "correct" decisions on it. I do whatever works and for some reason it still pays my bills. Currently I just use Laravel monoliths for everything and I am pretty sure this is good enough for most web services out there.
I know the original post wasnt about webapps, it's just where I find myself having the most issues.