How I learned of the importance of idempotency for work queues: a thread.https://twitter.com/ElleArmageddon/status/1255870742727585792 …
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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One of my first pieces of software that caused havoc on accident was a joke program that was supposed to annoy a friend by sending them a bunch of SMS messages that said "Hi!" Except, it was very good at this. The handset this program ran on was extremely efficient about sending
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right up until it got dropped off the network. That only lasted about 30 minutes. My friend's handset on the other hand, wasn't having such a great time. It became unusable almost instantly, rebooted, and then couldn't rejoin the network for 6 hours. It was a good joke, IMO.
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