This month, I want to highlight an article by Joel Spolsky, The Law of Leaky Abstractions. This article was recommended to me by an Amazon engineer, I find this concept applies well when we design systems, as it helps us remain cognizant of our system’s weaknesses.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions

“TCP is a way to transmit data that is reliable. By this I mean: if you send a message over a network using TCP, it will arrive, and it won’t be garbled or corrupted. We use TCP for many things like fetching web pages and sending email. The reliability of TCP is why every exciting email from embezzling East Africans arrives in letter-perfect condition. O joy.

By comparison, there is another method of transmitting data called IP which is unreliable. Nobody promises that your data will arrive, and it might get messed up before it arrives. If you send a bunch of messages with IP, don’t be surprised if only half of them arrive, and some of those are in a different order than the order in which they were sent, and some of them have been replaced by alternate messages, perhaps containing pictures of adorable baby orangutans, or more likely just a lot of unreadable garbage that looks like the subject line of Taiwanese spam.

Here’s the magic part: TCP is built on top of IP. In other words, TCP is obliged to somehow send data reliably using only an unreliable tool.”