I will frame the question in terms of a specific C# objective that I am working on right now but I imagine the question is a pretty general one related to the Dunning-Kruger effect, in a way - how do you know how to build an application when you don’t know all the issues you are supposed to prevent?

There is a message hub and I am developing a consumer for it. The original plan was to just create a few background services that get initialized alongside the application, that have a loop to load new messages/events and then process them.

Some time has passed and it feels like I am knees deep in Wolverine, Quartz, Hangfire, MassTransit, transactional outbox and all manner of different related things now. The potential issues are dealing with downtime, preventing loss of messages by storing them in a separate table before processing them, and everyone on the planet has a different idea on how to prevent and solve them and none of them sound simple and straightforward.

Honestly at this point I don’t know enough about which problems are going to appear down the line and if I need to use third party libraries, but I am guessing they exist for a reason and people aren’t supposed to just manually create their own amateurish implementations of them instead? But how do you know where to draw a line when you don’t know exactly the problems that you are supposed to be solving?
What are the problems with having a table for the message queue over a whole 3rd party library for it, or what’s wrong with the MS BackgroundService class? How are you supposed to know this?

  • CynoOP
    1·
    4 days ago

    This is good advice, thanks. I will definitely get it written down and approved eventually, but the issue is with

    It looks very open in your case. Is there no standard or precedent for what you are doing? Something you could lean on?

    We’re treading new water and doing stuff that nobody in the company is experienced with. We’re getting some ideas thrown at us but that’s the reason for this topic, I don’t feel knowledgeable yet to decide if they are in the right or if they are selling us hammers they like while we actually need something else.

    On the other hand, if I just do the simplest dumbest thing for an MVP, I am again just being a hammer and seeing everything as a nail when I should be learning, adapting and applying the correct tool? I kinda want to use the opportunity and do it better or learn something new.