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bdangubictoday at 4:17 AM1 replyview on HN

I am a contractor and have been fixing shit large part of my career. non-idempotent POSTs are just about always at the top of the list of shit to fix immediately. To this day (30 years in) I do not understand how can someone design a system where POSTs are not idempotent… I mean I know why, the vast majority of people in our industry are just not good at what they do but still…


Replies

SoftTalkertoday at 4:36 AM

Yep. I worked in corporate back-office IT way before the web era. It was a requirement that every batch job be re-runable idempotently. So if it failed, you'd identify the bad data, excise it, rerun the job, and deal with the bad record in the morning.