Soumabrata

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The Blog

Deep dives into backend engineering, distributed systems, and production war stories — written while building real things.

Engineering 10 min read June 2026

The Transactional Outbox Pattern — Why Fire-and-Forget Is a Fire Hazard

How replacing an async Kafka publish with a database-level outbox table turned a fragile dual-write into a crash-resilient, at-least-once delivery pipeline — and the two subtle bugs we found along the way.

Engineering 12 min read May 2026

Building a Production-Grade Webhook Relay — Asynchronous Event-Driven Architecture with Python & Kafka

How to build a self-hosted webhook relay that normalizes, transforms, and reliably delivers events with circuit breaking, rate limiting, exponential backoff, and full audit logging — using FastAPI, Kafka, PostgreSQL, and Redis.