Topic
Field notes and references exploring Distributed Systems.
Article
Consistency is usually filed under 'backend detail,' but staleness leaks straight into the interface and the business rules. Deciding how stale is acceptable is a product decision — here is how to treat it like one.
Article
Direct calls between services are simple until they aren't. Event-driven architecture is the answer to a specific failure of tightly coupled systems — here is the problem it actually solves.
Reference
A canonical explanation of the outbox pattern: how to update a database and publish an event without the two silently drifting apart when one of them fails.