Binary Semaphore

Services

Distributed systems

Services that stay correct when traffic, concurrency, and failure all show up at once.

Most outages are not exotic. They are the ordinary cases that were never designed for: a slow dependency, a retry storm, two writers racing for the same row. We design for those from the start.

We keep state consistent, make failure modes explicit, and prefer systems whose behaviour you can reason about over clever ones you cannot.

What this involves

Concurrency and correctness

Coordination that holds under load: the right locks, queues, and idempotency so the system does the right thing when everything happens at once.

Resilience and failure design

Timeouts, backpressure, and graceful degradation, so a slow or failing dependency does not take the whole service down with it.

Observability

Metrics, traces, and logs that show what the system is actually doing, so problems are visible before users feel them.