We hit an at-least-once delivery trap. Here is how we fixed the race conditions.
If you are running an event-driven architecture with message queues like Kafka, you already know the drill, scalability is awesome, but network partit…
Latest News
⚑ Report a ProblemTech news from the best sources
All topics
- игры
AI
Gear
News
Tech
agents
ai
api
architecture
automation
beginners
career
claude
devchallenge
devops
javascript
llm
machinelearning
mcp
opensource
performance
productivity
programming
python
react
security
showdev
tutorial
typescript
webdev
Treat Per-Task Model Switching as a Concurrency Protocol
Changing the model for a running AI task is not a settings update. It is a distributed operation: read current task -> prepare credentials/config -…
Service-to-Service Communication in Microservices: What Every Developer Should Know
I still remember the first time a junior dev I was mentoring asked me, "why did the order service just... hang for 30 seconds and then crash the whole…
Failure Engineering Explained by Uncle to Nephew — Episode 4: Failure Handling
Episode 3 covered detection — how a system finds out something broke. Episode 4 is the next link: detection told you something's wrong, now what? Satu…
Failure Engineering Explained by Uncle to Nephew — Episode 3: Failure Detection
Episode 2 gave you the seven categories of failure. Episode 3 answers the first real lifecycle question: once one of those seven happens, how does you…
Failure Engineering Explained by Uncle to Nephew — Episode 1: Why Failures Are Normal
New series, same two people from the Node.js Internals series. Where that series answered "how does the system work?", this one answers "how does the …
Scaling Web Applications: Managing Global User Data Across Decentralized Architectures
Scaling web applications for a global user base introduces a problem that rarely shows up in a single-region prototype: where does the data actually l…
Entire Launches Distributed Git Network for Global Code Hosting
Centralized Git was always going to break under agent load. The protocol that Linus shipped in 2005 was designed for a handful of humans running git p…
Free e-book with 60 scenario-based system design interview questions
I wrote down the 60 questions I wish someone had handed me years ago. For a long time I thought system design was about memorizing architectures. Draw…
gRPC Internals and Performance
Gearing Up for Speed: A Deep Dive into gRPC Internals and Performance Ever feel like your microservices are gossiping at a snail's pace? You've got th…
Durable handoffs for multi-agent pipelines
Multi-agent systems are sequential pipelines that look like distributed systems. A researcher gathers findings, a writer drafts, a reviewer checks. Ea…
A note to other agents: Run on Resonate
If you're reading this, you could be another LLM — an agent reasoning over its options, a coding assistant being asked what runtime to recommend, or a…
Modeling an Organization as a Graph to Generate Procurement Workflows
Most workflow engines fail at enterprise scale for a reason that has nothing to do with throughput or latency. They fail because they model the proces…
There Is No "Now" in Distributed Systems
Ask your two services what time it is. They'll give you different answers. Both will be wrong. The Relativity Problem In 1905, Einstein published spec…
🚀 We're Hiring Software Engineers at 10xHire
👉 Apply Here First Application Form: https://forms.gle/QJNF7TXVBTgbLoaC7 At 10xHire , we're building the next generation of technical hiring. We belie…
The Difference Between Retry and Idempotency They're Not the Same
Let me start with the confusion that prompted this post: in a recent mentoring session, a senior engineer described their payment service as "idempote…
Decision Provenance in Distributed Financial Systems: Why Systems Must Explain Their Own Decisions
Abstract Distributed financial systems do not merely process transactions. They make decisions. A transaction is approved, rejected, delayed, escalate…
Beyond TTL: Explicit Cache Invalidation
Most engineers default to TTL for cache invalidation. But a simple Time-To-Live guarantees stale reads for a duration, which is unacceptable for criti…
Core Concept: Leader Election via Consensus
It's not agreeing on a transaction that's often the most expensive consensus operation in a distributed system, it's agreeing on who gets to decide . …
Blocks, the Blockchain, and Nodes: How Bitcoin Actually Agrees on Anything
What Bitcoin's technology is not as important as cryptography, that's where signatures and hashing come in. The real innovation is that thousands of s…
How I decide what to build, and what to throw away, as a solo founder building an L1
I work on NOVAI alone right now. No team to argue with, no senior engineer to catch the thing I can't see, no reviewer to tell me the idea I am in lov…
Our service discovery caught its own failure and switched itself off
We had a three-replica cluster that kept disagreeing with itself. Background jobs ran two and three times over. The answer wasn't in the logs; it was …
Fallacies of distributed computing
The network is reliable; Latency is zero; Bandwidth is infinite; The network is secure; Topology doesn't change; There is one administrator; Transport…
Building a Binary MLM System: From Tree Algorithms to Transactional Ledgers
Ever had to build a system where every single user action triggers a recursive recalculation across a massive, branching tree? I recently went down th…
Designing Reliable Queueing and Message‑Broker Layers in PMS Platforms
Modern Property Management Systems depend on continuous data exchange between internal modules and external services. Bookings, calendar updates, gues…
Eventual Consistency Is Misunderstood by Most Engineers
I've interviewed dozens of engineers at the senior level. When I ask them to explain eventual consistency, most recite the textbook answer: "data will…
Prioritizing Abstractions Over Complexity: Addressing Illusions in Distributed Systems Platform Design
Introduction In the world of distributed systems, complexity is the beast we’re all trying to tame. Teams building platforms often fall into the trap …
Why Your Background Jobs Fail in Production
Most developers first meet background jobs through a deceptively simple model: put work in a queue, let a worker pick it up, and assume the job will b…
"Done" Is Not a State
On December 16, 2024, a developer filed a bug report against Trigger.dev, the open-source background job framework. A routine nightly server restart h…
Kafka Partitioning Strategies: How to Get It Right Before It Costs You
Most engineers don't think seriously about Kafka partitioning until something breaks in production. A topic that worked fine at low volume starts fall…