The text discusses the differences between developing within a monolithic codebase, such as Atlassian's Confluence, and microservices. It highlights that while working on a monolith can be slow due to large deployments taking hours or days, developers of microservices have more control over their changes and can ship them individually. This leads to a faster development cycle and increased ownership of the software. The author mentions how this contrast motivated a decomposition effort within Confluence's team to break off parts of the monolith into smaller services.