How I Engineer Systems
Principles for backend systems that need to remain understandable when things go wrong.
Practical principles around failure handling, important state, useful boundaries and operability.
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Make failure explicit
External services fail, requests get repeated and background jobs stop midway. Account for those cases as part of the design.
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Protect important state
Transactional and business-critical data needs clear ownership, validation and predictable state changes.
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Keep boundaries useful
Use architectural boundaries when they make a system easier to understand, test and change.
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Leave systems operable
Logs, metrics, audit trails and traceable workflows are part of building the system, not an afterthought.