In praise of small, sharp tools

The best software I use does one thing, has no config, and never updates. Notes on staying out of the way.

Backend work is mostly about effects, not messages. A request can arrive twice; the thing it triggers must not happen twice. The sooner you design for that, the calmer your on-call rotation gets.

The trick is a stable key the system can dedupe on, plus a durable place to remember which keys it has already handled — ideally the same transaction that performs the work.

Below is the shape I reach for. If the insert conflicts, the work was already done — we ack and move on. No distributed lock, no second system to keep in sync. Boring, durable, predictable.

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        void handle(Message m) {
      

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          // the message may arrive twice; the effect must not
      

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          String key = m.dedupeKey();
      

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          tx.run(() -> {
      

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            if (seen.contains(key)) return; // already done — ack
      

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            seen.mark(key);
      

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            work(m);
      

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          });
      

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        }
      

That’s the whole idea. The hard part was never delivery — it was deciding what “the same job” means, and writing it down somewhere durable.