I build the parts of a product that cannot fail quietly.

I write backend systems for products that handle money. Right now that means the Trade Finance team at Leads Corporation, building a new trade finance module for BankUltimus - Spring Boot underneath, Angular 19 on top, Kafka carrying events between services, and a Rust orchestrator holding together transactions no single database can wrap. Before that it was three years of agency and client work: remittance, bookings and marketplaces serving markets where most people do not hold a bank account.

Somewhere past a hundred projects, you stop being impressed by the happy path. A transfer is a debit in one currency, a conversion, and a credit on a network with its own settlement timing, and there is no transaction spanning all three. What the job actually consists of is deciding what a partial failure leaves behind - a queryable, resumable record, or an ambiguous one that needs a human to investigate at 2am.

That shapes how I build. State transitions get written before the network call that triggers them. Handlers are keyed on the caller's reference so a retry converges rather than duplicating. Messages are validated at the boundary, not three services deep. Anything touching a third party goes on a queue instead of into the request. None of it is clever. It is the difference between a system that can be operated and one that has to be babysat.