Designing Reliable Backend Operations
Decide how failures are represented, when repeating an operation is safe, and when retries make a struggling system worse.
4 articles published
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Articles in this series
Follow the order below, or choose the article you need.
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01
Why to use Custom Exceptions in PHP
When creating applications with PHP, Exceptions play a vital role in handling errors and irregularities that arise during the application lifecycle. We are going to see how to use Custom Exceptions to improve our applications.
May 2, 2024 · 7 minutes
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02
PHP Errors, Exceptions, and Result Types: Designing Failure Boundaries
A deep dive into PHP failure boundaries, from validation and result types to exception translation, safe retries, background workers, observability, and testing partner-payment failures.
Aug 27, 2026 · 20 minutes
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03
Idempotency: What, Why and How
A deep dive into idempotency, from the theory behind safe retries to a practical Laravel implementation using the Laravel Idempotency package.
Apr 27, 2026 · 18 minutes
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04
When Retries Make Things Worse: Protecting Your System From Overload
How a slow dependency becomes an outage, and how deadlines, concurrency limits, retry budgets, and jitter protect useful work. A practical deep dive with PHP examples and a controlled overload test design.
Oct 17, 2026 · 16 minutes