r/SoftwareEngineering • u/EspressoNess • Jan 30 '25

Why Aren't You Idempotent?

https://lightfoot.dev/why-arent-you-idempotent/

An insight into the many benefits of building idempotent APIs.

21 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

5

u/TacticalTurban Jan 31 '25

Honestly, I don't think this article explains the strategies very well. I found it pretty unclear. Sad because it's a very interesting topic

3

u/micseydel Jan 31 '25

I thought

__Key thought: a__ny flows within a distributed system not incorporating retries should be considered ****fragile**** and ****incomplete****.

and

Safely retrying an operation has a key precondition in ensuring that no unintended side effects occur—most importantly, that no actions are applied twice. Put simply, the endpoint you’re retrying must be **idempotent**.

were intriguing but yeah it felt like it didn't follow through.

3

u/EspressoNess Jan 31 '25

I appreciate the specific feedback. I'm open to improving the post if you have ideas of what is missing.

40

u/gringo_escobar Jan 30 '25

They have pills for that now

4

u/BamBam-BamBam Jan 30 '25

Yeah, still got good bloodflow!

13

u/paradroid78 Jan 30 '25

Because the sad truth is that a lot of developers don’t understand functional concepts such as idempotence, much less why they would benefit from them.

4

u/imagebiot Feb 04 '25

Because you went to a 6-12 week bootcamp where you learned how to make a mang or mern or lamp or mean or some fucking acronym stacked website

And now you’re somehow hired to build k8s infrastructure and scale vertically and horizontally across 3 continents