@patbmcdonald

Patrick McDonald

@patbmcdonaldNew Jersey, USAJoined July 2026

Building systems that can explain themselves.

About

Staff software engineer writing about distributed systems, payments infrastructure, AI reliability, and designing applications that remain explainable under failure.

Available for

Open to connecting with engineers, founders, and teams working on complex backend systems.

Patrick McDonald's blogs

Patrick McDonaldwww.patbmcdonald.com2 posts

When Your Application Can’t Explain Its Own State, Part 2: Building State Your Application Can Explain

THE AUTHORITY GAP · PART 2 A worker asks a payment provider to issue a refund. The request times out. The provider may have completed it. It may not have. The application does not know. What should ha

Sep 14 · 11 min readpatbmcdonald.com

When Your Application Can’t Explain Its Own State, Part 1: The Authority Gap

Some of the hardest production incidents are not full outages. They are the incidents where an operation finished in one place and not another. A payment provider accepts a charge, but the HTTP client

3Jul 28 · 10 min readpatbmcdonald.com

Patrick McDonald

About

Available for

Patrick McDonald's blogs

When Your Application Can’t Explain Its Own State, Part 2: Building State Your Application Can Explain

When Your Application Can’t Explain Its Own State, Part 1: The Authority Gap

Search Hashnode

Patrick McDonald

About

Available for

Patrick McDonald's blogs

When Your Application Can’t Explain Its Own State, Part 2: Building State Your Application Can Explain

When Your Application Can’t Explain Its Own State, Part 1: The Authority Gap