How To Break Up God Objects, Strategies For Clean Backend Architecture

Let’s talk about an architectural horror show most of us have either inherited or (be honest) accidentally built ourselves: the God Object. You know it when you see it. One class, module, or service that knows everything, does everything, and quietly terrorizes anyone brave enough to touch it. This beast creeps up in backend codebases across languages and stacks, from .NET to Python, especially when you’re moving fast and Just need to ship. Here’s how I’ve learned to spot, survive, and refactor God Objects in real production systems.

In practice, a God Object is a single class (or sometimes a single module) that:

Knows too much about business logic, data access, and infrastructure

Is referenced everywhere, making it nearly impossible to change without breaking things

In C#, it’s often a bloated Service or Manager class. In Python, it might be a FastAPI dependency or a utility module that ends up handling everything from DB queries to HTTP calls to AI integration.

sketch a typical path from clean code to chaos, using a .NET example:

You start with a simple OrderService. It handles creating and updating orders.

A teammate needs to send emails on order creation. Let’s just add an EmailSender property to OrderService.

Now you need to audit every order change. Eh, just inject IAuditLogger into OrderService too.

Background job to sync orders to the cloud? OrderService already has access to everything, let’s put it there.

Source: Dev.to