In the world of consulting, not every challenge arrives with flashing warning signs. Sometimes, it’s a sneaky little glitch that turns into a major roadblock, and how you respond to it says a lot about how you think.
Rajat’s story is one of those classic “it’s-not-a-bug-it’s-a-system-thing” moments. But instead of diving straight into the code, he took a step back and that shift in perspective made all the difference.
What follows isn’t just a fix to a technical hiccup; it’s trusting your instincts (and past experiences) to navigate it through. Read more…
Rajat (R): This happened on a recent project where we were working with a microservices architecture — something we’ve done many times before. But this time, we ran into a strange issue that threw us off: after users logged in through our authentication service, the anti-forgery token they received wasn’t usable by any of the other downstream services. Everything looked fine on the surface, but behind the scenes, requests to other secure endpoints were failing validation. It was frustrating — both for users and for us.
At first, it wasn’t obvious what was going wrong. But then it clicked: anti-forgery tokens are scoped in a way that doesn’t play nicely across different services, especially when those services sit on different subdomains or paths. We were dealing with a classic case of context getting lost between services that were supposed to trust each other.
Instead of trying to patch things ad hoc, we decided to take a step back and rethink the token flow entirely. We centralized the way anti-forgery tokens were issued and validated — using a shared data protection key store so all services could talk the same encryption language. Then, we plugged in a lightweight middleware to handle token validation uniformly across services.
What helped me crack it was my instinct to zoom out and look at the whole system, not just the isolated error. I’ve found that system-level thinking — being able to see how different pieces interact and where information might be falling through the cracks — often makes the difference. That, along with my background in web security, helped me cut through the noise and get to a solution that worked across the board.
R: One of the most eye-opening experiences for me was when we had to upgrade a live project running on an open-source CMS to its latest framework. By the time we got the request, the team had already completed about 50% of the development work — so naturally, everyone thought, “How hard can the upgrade be?”
Well, it turned out to be very hard.
The upgrade wasn’t just about updating modules and running tests. As we dug deeper, we realized many of the custom and contributed modules were either broken, deprecated, or flat-out incompatible with the new framework. To make things worse, the latest CMS version didn’t play well with our existing web server and database setup.
At that point, we had two options: keep patching things and hope for the best, or take a breath, reassess, and come up with a more sustainable approach. We went with the latter. We divided responsibilities across the team — one person looked into database compatibility, another handled server-side checks, someone else focused on module viability, and so on. We documented everything, cross-checked CMS guidelines, and built a map of what needed to change and what could stay.
What that project taught me is this: good problem-solving in tech isn’t about being the smartest person in the room. It’s about knowing when to step back, bring people in, and treat the problem like a shared puzzle. Since then, I’ve approached every tricky project with the same mindset — assess the risks, understand the dependencies, and build a solution together.
