We Had 15 Microservices and It Took 2 Weeks to Onboard a Developer. Here's How We Fixed It in a Weekend.

How we went from "ask someone for the .env" to one-click local development for our entire microservice stack. If you're running microservices, you've probably been here: A new developer joins. You point them at the repos. Then begins the ritual. Clone this. Run migrations on that. Ask Slack for the latest .env . Debug why nginx isn't routing. Realize they're on Node 20 but this service needs Node 23. Spend two hours figuring out why the queue consumer isn't connecting. Two weeks later, they write their first line of actual code. We had 15 NestJS microservices. Each with its own repo, its own .env , its own database schema, migrations, queues, and inter-service dependencies. Every developer had their own frankensteined local setup — commented-out code, hardcoded URLs, an nginx config held together with hope. Integration testing? People just tested directly against the shared dev database. New joiners spent their first week or two just getting things running. I'm the CTO. I'm hands-on, b