Issue 01: Audit trails as a first-class component

Most teams build the audit trail as the last thing before the regulator asks for it. That timing is the problem. By then the events you wish you had logged were never logged, the schema is whatever fell out of the request handler, and the retention story is a SQL view written under deadline.

A first-class audit trail is the inverse. It is in the design from day one, it owns its own schema, and the feature code calls into it the same way it calls into the database. The blog post below is the long form of the argument. The case study underneath is what it looks like in practice on a payments console that was four years old when we started.