Idempotency, and Why Retries Need It
A network can't tell a client whether its request failed or only its reply did. Idempotent operations make that ambiguity safe to retry through.
Software engineering
Building and maintaining software systems, and the practices around them.
Essays
Garden
Identity over time
Questions about what makes something persist through change — and an unexpected echo of them in software.
Retries are inevitable
Over a network, a client that times out cannot know what happened. So it will retry — and the system must be built to survive that.