Ask HN: Soliciting critique/feedback for your technical architecture?

Lately I've been interested in pursuing a whole range of side projects that bear no resemblance to my day job (vanilla java Spring mid-tier service in a large enterprise company). While I know experiential learning is best by building, making mistakes, incrementally improving (rinse, repeat) I'm curious to understand how folks here get their projects' technical architecture critiqued. Please note that I'm not dismissing the value of books/blogs/talks but I'm talking about once all those materials have been surveyed fairly well, what other options are available to validate your thought process.

Do you post a high level overview online and get the community to provide feedback, or do you rely on friends/co-workers to chime in and provide some insight? The kinds of questions I'd like to get answers to are around something to the effect of "Hmm, your data pipeline should use Kafka and elastic search for XYZ reason instead of RabbitMQ and cassandra for the scale and access patterns you're interested in." "For the fault tolerance you're interested in, erlang would be a good fit" "Here's some other projects/case studies that made ABC tradeoffs that are worth surveying..." Trouble is most of the people I'm surrounded by at work haven't expanded their skills beyond what's expected at the job, so I don't find discussions with them about the architectural possibilities as illuminating as I'd hope.

Are there any reliable ways to get answers to such questions from people who are experienced? Solving different flavors of problems seems crucial to truly level up as an engineer, and I just want to make sure I can get feedback so that I can immerse myself intelligently.

AFAIK, Stackoverflow gets used for these types of questions a fair amount in a very ad-hoc manner (YMMV in terms of successful responses) and there is a "Code Review" stackexchange; I haven't yet stumbled upon a strictly dedicated forum which revolves around critiquing "system architecture".

I've been wondering the same thing lately. I tried posting to the NodeJS subreddit, but it's near deserted.

Rarely you will find one gleaming Solution - even if you are capable of identifying and discussing all important factors prior to the design, and know perfectly all of the properties of various pre-built systems that may be used to assemble it. Almost always it is necessary to proceed with an architecture that has been segmented in to manageable components and APIs, knowing that you can swap out individual portions as issues are identified. That said, personally I really enjoy this kind of thing and have actually been considering starting a consulting business in the same vein; I would be willing to have a look for you just to get a better understanding of your what you are looking for and gain some insight in to potential customer requirements in this area should I decide to proceed with a consulting practice.

Realistically everything is mostly shitty architecture and nearly on fire all the time.

The best critique is surviving production and constant iteration and tackling limits and problems as they become apparent.

If you see a problem, research solutions and hit the cycle again. Sometimes things don't work.

There's not much science in it I'm afraid.