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patio11's profile
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11

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Patrick McKenzie

@patio11

I work for the Internet, at @stripe, mostly on accelerating startups. Opinions here are my own.

東京都 Tokyo
kalzumeus.com
Joined February 2009

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    Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 May 2
    • Report Tweet
    • Report NetzDG Violation

    Patrick McKenzie Retweeted the apocalypse, but fashion  🦝

    How I learned of the importance of idempotency for work queues: a thread.https://twitter.com/ElleArmageddon/status/1255870742727585792 …

    Patrick McKenzie added,

    the apocalypse, but fashion  🦝 @ElleArmageddon
    This is your unscheduled reminder that telling early-in-career engineers stories of times you messed something up real bad is a good way to help them combat their own impostor syndrome.
    Show this thread
    2:48 AM - 2 May 2020
    • 56 Retweets
    • 329 Likes
    • Jim Weisser Dylan Baker Jay Looney codingAlong Samuel Pedraza Arioston MR HSSN Nebojša Kamber Jon Atkins
    3 replies 56 retweets 329 likes
      1. New conversation
      2. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 May 2
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        About 9 years ago, I was the owner and sole developer at a company which delivered scheduled reminders over phone calls. The logic was, essentially, “If someone needs a call today, and they haven’t been called, put a call on the queue to them.” We ran this check every 5 minutes.

        4 replies 1 retweet 37 likes
        Show this thread
      3. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 May 2
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        One day, I made a change to an unrelated part of the queue worker which caused them to block (not process any events, including calls). Importantly, a) they usually took 5s to run and b) we had never had something fail to execute within 5 min before. See where this is going?

        1 reply 1 retweet 14 likes
        Show this thread
      4. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 May 2
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        I discovered the bug late that day, because I was in the midst of an office/apartment move and my phone ended up in one of the boxes. 12 hours had elapsed and there were thousands of events on the queue. I reverted the commit that was blocking the queue and let it drain.

        1 reply 0 retweets 12 likes
        Show this thread
      5. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 May 2
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        What I thought had happened: OK, X,000 less important analytics events and a few dozen phone calls scheduled for this morning delivered within a half hour of scheduled time. That was not what had happened.

        1 reply 0 retweets 13 likes
        Show this thread
      6. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 May 2
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        What had actually happened was, every five minutes for 12 hours, an entry was added to the queue for each person who needed a phone call. When I restarted the queue, they all fired within 2 minutes.

        1 reply 0 retweets 26 likes
        Show this thread
      7. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 May 2
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        Now let’s talk about the scalability or cloud systems versus the scalability of a plain old telephone. The telecom system is very capable of delivering 80 phone calls in 2 minutes. Phones don’t tolerate that so well.

        2 replies 0 retweets 19 likes
        Show this thread
      8. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 May 2
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        So this manifested for customers’ customers as their phones ringing off the hook. Answer a call. Hang up on it. That’s one. Phone rings immediately. Answer and hang up. That’s two. Most people pulled the cord from the wall before counting to ~70.

        1 reply 0 retweets 26 likes
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      9. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 May 2
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        When I realized what had happened it was after midnight in Japan. I was in a new apartment with no reliable phone or Internet. I walked across town, in freezing rain, holding a laptop and wired phone, so that I could deliver apology calls to customers and customers’ customers.

        1 reply 0 retweets 36 likes
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      10. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 May 2
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        I broke down crying after the first three, and called my dad, certain that I had just bankrupted the business. We actually lost two customers. One came back after receiving an explanation. Anyhow, that’s why you add to queues using an idempotency key.

        5 replies 7 retweets 180 likes
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      11. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 May 2
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        Worth noting, since people often think that only noobs made mistakes: I was 10 years into my career at this point, have a CS degree, had run multiple businesses and written code used in production by Serious People at my day job, etc.

        6 replies 7 retweets 187 likes
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      12. End of conversation

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