2013 was a year of unlearning—especially around state management. Coming from a relational DB background, I was used to strong consistency, transactions, and rollback guarantees.
But as I worked with distributed services and messaging systems, I had to embrace eventual consistency. And it wasn’t easy.
Lessons that stuck:
- Business rules need to tolerate temporary anomalies.
- Duplicate events are normal. Idempotency is essential.
- Visibility tools (like dead-letter queues and audit trails) are more important than perfect reliability.
You don’t truly understand distributed systems until you debug a race condition that only happens once a week across 3 nodes.