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Why Sagas Feel Broken

So, you built an elaborate system with commands, queues, an event-driven architecture, retries, timeouts, and, most importantly, compensating actions all handled within sagas. But do you really? Because then you get a call from support. There’s an order where the payment is pending, and it’s been pending for 48 hours. You look into it and see that the payment provider did charge the customer, but your system shows that the payment didn’t go through. So which is true? Clearly, the payment provider. YouTube Check out my YouTube channel, where I post all kinds of content on Software Architecture & Design, including this… Read More »Why Sagas Feel Broken

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Debugging Event-Driven Systems: 5 Problems Teams Create

A post on Medium was shared with me by a member of my channel. A team went all in on event-driven architecture, and now they feel like they can’t debug anything. I get it, debugging event-driven systems can seem challenging. But it’s not directly because of event-driven architecture. It’s because of their misunderstanding of it and how they were applying it. So let’s break down the five pain points they had, why they had that pain, and how you can avoid it. YouTube Check out my YouTube channel, where I post all kinds of content on Software Architecture & Design, including this… Read More »Debugging Event-Driven Systems: 5 Problems Teams Create

Just Use Postgres as a Queue?

I’ve noticed a trend, and a lot of people are saying the same thing: just use Postgres as a queue. No Kafka, no Redis, no RabbitMQ, just one database for everything. And I totally get it. I get the appeal. There are fewer moving parts. There is less infrastructure. There is only one thing to run. But what feels simple at the very beginning can often lead to a lot of complexity later. It’s like using Excel when you really need a database. Sure, it holds data. You understand Excel well. But are you really about to build a relational… Read More »Just Use Postgres as a Queue?