Database Transactions One thing you don't want in a wallet system is money leaving one account without reaching the other. I am building PropInvest, a property investment platform where users can fund wallets and invest in real estate. When an investor puts money into a property, the system needs to: - Deduct funds from their wallet - Create the investment record - Update the property's funding status - Log the transaction Now, what happens if the wallet is debited, but the server crashes before creating the investment? The investor's money is gone, but they don't own any shares. That's a nightmare. This is why database transactions matter. A database transaction lets you group multiple operations together so they either all succeed or all fail. If the wallet debit, investment creation, and transaction log all succeed, the transaction commits. If any step fails, everything rolls back. The wallet stays untouched. No partial state. This is called atomicity, the A in ACID. ACID stands for: - Atomicity: All operations succeed, or none do. - Consistency: The transaction preserves database rules and constraints. - Isolation: Concurrent transactions don't interfere with each other. - Durability: Once committed, changes persist even if the system crashes. For PropVest's wallet operations, every debit, credit, and record is wrapped in the same database transaction. One important detail though: this protects database changes within that transaction. It doesn't automatically reverse an external action, like a payment already sent to Paystack. That is why I also used idempotency keys, locked balances, and reconciliation workers. But transactions were the foundation. When handling money, a successful API response isn't enough. You need to make sure the underlying operations are actually safe. Never assume your code will complete every step. Design your database operations to handle failure.

One of the reasons we have so much slop is cause people don’t understand that just because something can be created doesn’t mean it should be created.

100% and then, have to go back and learn another skill....and the cycle continues. because, no matter how we try to deny it, AI IS taking software engineering jobs, or at least morphing it. Tasks/projects that could take an entire team months can now be handled by a single engineer in a few weeks and if that engineer has solid fundamentals, he can easily maintain/scale it and there will be no consequence of bad code. So, more unemployed software engineers, less entry level roles. we're already feeling it, and AI agents are only getting smarter

Transactional Outbox Pattern One thing I've implemented in PropInvest - a platform I am building for fractional real estate ownership, is the Transactional Outbox Pattern. Say you're building a wallet system for property investments. A user purchases shares in a property. You debit their wallet, credit the property pool, and commit the transaction. Then you publish an "investment_completed" event to Kafka (or any other message broker e.g RabbitMQ) so that the notification service can alert the user and update their portfolio. Simple enough, right? But what happens if your application crashes after the database commit but before publishing the event? The investment succeeded, money moved, but the notification was never sent. Other services that depend on that event - like portfolio tracking - may never know the investment happened. Now, if you publish the event before committing the transaction, you have the opposite problem. The event gets published, but the database transaction might fail. Other services are reacting to an investment that never actually went through. This is the dual-write problem. The Transactional Outbox Pattern solves this by saving the business data and the event in the same database transaction. If the transaction commits, both are saved. If it rolls back, neither is saved. A separate worker reads pending events from the outbox table, publishes them to the message broker - Kafka in this case, and marks them as processed. If the worker goes down, the event is still in the database and can be published when the worker comes back up. But there's a catch. The worker could publish an event successfully, crash before marking it as processed, and publish it again after restarting. That means duplicates are possible. This is where idempotency comes in. Give every event a unique ID, and let consumers track which events they've already processed. If an event arrives again, the consumer can safely skip the duplicate. The same principle applies to API requests. If a client retries an investment purchase because of a timeout, an idempotency key helps prevent the same shares from being purchased twice. One thing to keep in mind: the outbox prevents the database change and the intent to publish from getting out of sync. It doesn't guarantee exactly-once delivery or processing. You still have to handle retries and duplicates yourself. The outbox handles reliable event delivery. Idempotency handles repeated execution. Both matter when building systems where a missed event or a duplicate operation can cause real problems - especially when real money is involved.

lmao since after university days, i never gather morale enter that line again. anytime i remember, na so so "someday" i go dey talk inside my mind 😂

Money just dey fly up and down for America.

Holy Spirit, please help me plan my life.

actually, life tip

don't rage bait me this night

BBC was the greatest trio in football, not because they were the most beautiful, but because they were the most inevitable. MSN was beauty. You watched them and you smiled. The one-twos, the little flicks, the friendship. It was football as art. It was made to be admired. BBC was not made to be admired. BBC was made to win. To destroy. Bale running like a horse that escaped war. Benzema sacrificing himself, linking, bleeding for the team with no credit. And Ronaldo - the storm in the middle. The end product. The man who turned every attack into a sentence. MSN would caress you. BBC would kill you. And that is the dichotomy of Messi and Ronaldo. Messi is beauty. When he plays, football feels pure. It feels like it was meant to be like that. You watch him and you feel something in your chest. Ronaldo is greatness. When he plays, football feels powerful. It feels like willpower can beat talent. You watch him and you feel something in your gut - the fear, the awe, the inevitability that he will find a way. Both are good. But one is beautiful, the other one is great. Beauty makes you fall in love with football. Greatness makes you remember why you will never forget it.

real

blasphemy

this is who jorge jesus and the portugal team wants to disrespect?? someone that literally carried their team for years! appalling!

The harder you work, the luckier you become.

As long as I’m alive, I’ve infinite chances of making it.

I"ll be starting with Sriniously's YT series "Backend Principles". It comes highly recommended and I have been meaning to go through it. I like the fact that it is language-agnostic so that I can focus on the principles and not worry about syntax at the same time.

I've observed that there are some gaps in my fundamentals; I'm not yet a cracked engineer as i would like to be, so I will be going back to the basics and building up from there again from now until new year's. Let's see how it goes.