39 long-form articles on production engineering — how real systems fail, why, and what actually fixed them.
7 articles matching “Idempotency”
AI Agents18 min read
The Refund Agent will not refund until the carrier confirms the return. The Shipping Agent will not create a return label until the refund is approved.
Production Incidents28 min read
A timeout is not a failure. Ten real ways idempotency keys break in payment systems — lost gateway responses, two tabs, racing retries, Redis evictions, expired keys, duplicate webhooks — with the fix for each, ten…
Scaling & Infra22 min read
Not a "what is serverless" post. The stuff you learn after the demo, from someone who's run it at scale.
Architecture Decisions22 min read
A plain-language walkthrough of Pat Helland's 2007 classic "Life beyond Distributed Transactions" — the paper that named the patterns every large system already uses.
WebSockets & Real-time20 min read
When you press Enter in Slack, the message does not travel over the WebSocket your client is holding open — it goes out as a separate HTTPS POST to chat.
Production Incidents25 min read
Why “our queue guarantees exactly-once” is almost always a lie once your flow crosses a component boundary: Kafka EOS scope, ack-after-process, unique constraints, SQS FIFO, DB transactions with SMTP, retries without…
Scaling & Infra20 min read
Not a "what is Lambda" post. A deep dive into how Lambda actually works: Firecracker microVMs and the Worker/placement fleet, how invocations get routed on the warm vs cold path, and what the INIT phase really does (and…