Building a Mission-Critical Integration Blind, Part I: XML, Queues, and Guesswork

Part 1 of 2. Part 2 covers what 100,000 requests revealed about the architecture.

There's a particular kind of freedom that comes with a blank slate. No legacy code. No decade-old architectural decisions are baked into the foundation. No monolith where changing one thing breaks three others. Just a task, a deadline, and full ownership of every decision.

Late November 2025. I was asked to design and build a service connecting three of our company's trading platforms to a national government data exchange infrastructure. The system processes millions of legally significant requests across tax authorities, business registries, and state services — with XML signatures, GOST cryptography, asynchronous message delivery, and strict auditability requirements. These three platforms generate ~90% of the company's revenue. The project was a C-level priority.

Stack:PHP 8.4, Symfony, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Nginx, Kubernetes. Not the most exciting combination — but this was a team product. Building something...

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