I recently tackled a technical challenge for a role I wanted at XBorg: Build an Auth system with Google OAuth and HttpOnly cookies, with bonus points for doing it as Microservices.

The catch? The required stack was NestJS + @nest/microservices + TypeORM. My experience with NestJS? Zero.

But I knew it can't be that hard. I've built hundreds of APIs and full-stack websites. I understand patterns—Dependency Injection, Message Brokers, Stateless Auth (JWT), and Microservice architecture.

If you understand the patterns, the framework is just an implementation detail.

I didn't waste time on tutorials. I didn't let AI do it for me. I read the docs to map their terminology to the concepts I already knew. I used AI to explain things where their docs was not clear.

In a few hours, I had a fully distributed architecture running in Docker: API Gateway, Auth Service, and User Service, all connected via Redis.

The Lesson:

• Frameworks are temporary. Start learning patterns.

• AI should sharpen you, not replace your thinking.