fafle

Datadog gave me a take-home assignment, which I could have done sloppily in one day or done well in two days. They added "we respect your time, so don't spend more than 3 hours on it". Then they rejected my solution because I didn't guard for all kinds of invalid input that was never mentioned anywhere.

The issue of running a transaction that spans multiple heterogeneous systems is usually solved with a 2 phase commit. The "jobs" abstraction from the article looks similar to the "coordinator" in 2PC. The article does not talk about how they achieve fault tolerance in case the "job" crashes inbetween the two transactions. Postgres supports the XA standard, which might help with this. Kafka does not support it.