The Importance of Being Ernest But Also Idempotent

Reliable Systems for Serious People

Oscar Wilde · 7 June 2026

“To lose one packet may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

A dazzling comedy of manners concerning idempotency, retries, message delivery guarantees, and the disastrous social consequences of executing the same financial transaction twice.

Contents

1. Chapter 1: The Duplicate Request
2. Chapter 2: A Trivial Matter of Consistency
3. Chapter 3: Cecily Retries the Transaction
4. Chapter 4: The Importance of Stable Endpoints

Published by Austenpunk, the distinguished imprint for engineers who believe that every production incident would be improved by a stronger sense of narrative irony.

This essential volume combines literary feeling, technical anxiety, and just enough documentation to suggest that somebody once understood the system.