Core elements of the outbox pattern

• Outbox table. We write to this within the same transaction that creates/emits the root event in a system
• Downstream relay service. This polls the outbox tables it’s subscribed to, and propagates the event to relevant parts of the system
  • Such as async processes. When these ack receipt and success, the outbox table’s status column is updated to something that represents Processed
  • The relay service can have retry mechanisms in place, to ensure messages get delivered downstream

Benefits

• More resilience against transmission failures. This pattern guarantees delivery
• Improved UX for user facing actions. A user won’t have to wait for all your system’s background tasks to complete before getting some sort of feedback

Misc notes

• Having a complementary inbox on the consumer side feels like overkill for me 👀
• A reliable message queue can simplify the implementation. SQS & Redis come to mind

Example

• ✅ When you have a moment, create a demo repo.

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POSSE

I’m an advocate for owning your content, and publishing on your own platform. There’s a term for that - POSSE.

POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content. - source - https://indieweb.org/POSSE

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Architecture

• Maxi Ferrerira’s frontend architecture newsletter

Exploring Local First

• Solid canonical resource - localfirst.fm

• Another great entrypoint - localfirstweb.dev

• Syntaxfm:

  • The Local First landscape
  • The LoFi movement
  • How 1Password uses WASM & Rust for local-first dev
  • Local-first, Typescript, & Overtone with Johannes Schickling

• Essay from Ink & Switch that so many people have recommended: Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud. There are more essays on the site, it’s worth a browse

  …

Context

I go through lots of tech content: articles, podcasts, books, videos. As a result, I often find myself sharing the same groups of links with my mates & colleagues, all over different chat apps.

This is a consolidation effort.

Books on my shelf

• An Elegant Puzzle. Been a big fan of Will’s blog for a while now. This book’s my current active read, I’ve been wanting to read his books for a while. This summary gave me the final nudge to start the book.
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications. I watched a youtube video not too long ago, that I felt was a great summary of the book. Left me wanting to dig in

Useful for Freelancers/Contractors

• Ditching hourly podcast with Jonathan Stark
• The Freelancer podcast with Kyle Prinsloo. Byte-sized & helpful episodes.

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Some long form content

WIP - publishing for early feedback😛

I've had the pleasure of working on some multi-tenant products, and noticed some concerns repeat themselves. This note tries to capture some of those

Some musings & observations on refactoring

From the Legacy Code Rocks podcast

bits about MySQL architecture

Such a wide array of topics. It was a fun year for learning

You might find this podcast useful👇

An attempted answer to a question asked in the Frontend masters Discord

How Route 53 uses Shuffle Sharding to improve availability when assigning customers to virtual name servers.

highlights, quotes, & other interesting bits from Spotify Teardown

Trying to have a good overview of the architecture of pieces involved with building this backend service.

learning platforms & courses I have an interest in

this term has been referred to enough times around me, for me to want to understand what it means.

Various lessons and clippings from Martin Fowler.

notes on the saga's pattern