Architecture Decision Records

Short records of decisions that were genuinely contested — where a competent engineer could reasonably have chosen otherwise, and where the reasoning is worth preserving after the context is forgotten.

Deliberately not recorded: choices with no real alternative (using Spring Boot in a Spring Boot project), or with an obvious answer (BCrypt for passwords). An ADR set padded with non-decisions makes the real ones harder to find.

ADR	Decision	Status
001	PostgreSQL as the relational database	Accepted
002	Stateless JWT authentication	Accepted, with known limits
003	Flyway migrations, ddl-auto=validate	Accepted
004	Testcontainers over H2 for integration tests	Accepted
005	Single deployable, not microservices	Accepted
006	BigDecimal / NUMERIC for money	Accepted

Format: context, options considered, decision, consequences — including the bad ones. An ADR that lists no downsides is marketing, not a record.