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Comment by internetter | Hacker News Reader

"Note: I want to preface this by saying yes the practices here are bad and could have been avoided. This was from a different time under large time constraints. Please read with that in mind"

These "constraints" are why I'm terrified of subscribing to software

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I have immense respect for the OP for writing up the story, and even more so for giving this preface. It's really useful to know what mistakes other people make, but can be quite embarrassing to tell others about mistakes you've made. Thanks, OP.

>subscribing

The previous world where you buying per user seat licenses for hundreds and hundreds of dollars wasn't great.

Having worked with some legacy subscription code it can be quite nasty.

We had race conditions where we would charge users twice

This has made me paranoid that any time I see timeout or error related to money I assume it went through and come back later.

A local cinema's shitty website charged me and, immediately after, my wifi disconnected for a few seconds. This somehow crashed their server entirely for several minutes, failing to send me the tickets even when it got back up.

It took me several threatening emails to make them understand they had already taken my money and I wasn't going to try again until I got a refund. Now I'm paranoid any time I purchase online at mediocre shops.

out of curiosity, what's the technical solution? My guess: add an idempotency key to the request and a message queue? Then when you try to consume it, you check whether that request was made previously.

I tried subway online ordering once almost a year ago. The last final screen crashed and deleted the entire order from my cart. Anyways, you're probably wondering if the order actually went through but subway's UI was shit and nearly tricked me into replacing the same order a second time: yes.

The alternative is writing it yourself, which adds constraints to everything else :)

Doing a rewrite under "large" time constraints is also unusual.

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