Tag
Distributed Systems
4 posts
August 2026
Retry Without Paying Twice: Idempotency Keys and the Draft That Expired in April
Every payment API ships a header called Idempotency-Key, and no RFC defines it. The IETF draft that tried expired on 18 April 2026, is absent from the IANA field-name …
Audit Logs That Don't Lie: Engineering Trustworthy Audit Trails
Most audit logs are diaries — written in good faith, full of gaps, and useless the day they matter. An audit log's actual job is to be believed under hostile questioning: …
July 2026
The Bot That Opened Merge Requests: Push vs Pull for Config, Credentials, and License Distribution
When an artifact expires and renews on a schedule — a TLS certificate, a software license, a signing key set — somebody has to move the fresh copy to everyone who needs …
Rate Limits Are a Contract: Algorithms, Keys, State, and the Fail-Open Question Nobody Wants to Own
A rate limit is not a throttle knob — it is a published promise with two failure modes, and most teams have never decided which one they signed up for. This post works …