A municipal records system doesn't need to be interesting. It needs to work on a Tuesday morning when three offices are querying it at once, and it needs to keep working for a decade with minimal maintenance.
The stack: Postgres for the data, Next.js for the application, a single VPS for deployment. No Kubernetes, no message queues, no microservices. Every one of those is a moving part that can fail at 2 AM, and LGU systems don't get 2 AM on-call rotations.
Boring technology has known failure modes. Postgres has been battle-tested for thirty years; its failure modes are documented, its recovery procedures are practiced. A novel distributed stack has failure modes nobody has seen yet, and municipal records are not the place to discover them.
There's also a compliance angle. Government data in the Philippines falls under the Data Privacy Act of 2012, and a simple, well-understood architecture is far easier to audit and secure than a sprawl of services. Fewer components means a smaller attack surface and a clearer chain of custody for citizen data.
The real constraint isn't scale, it's continuity. The person maintaining this system in five years may not be a senior engineer. Boring stacks have deep hiring pools, mature documentation, and answers to almost every question already on the internet. That's the feature that matters.
