A senior engineer spotted a bug in my pipeline. I fixed it the same day. Here is what I learned.

A few weeks ago I published an article about an event-driven order pipeline I built in .NET with Kafka and Azure Service Bus. Someone left a comment that stopped me in my tracks. Andrew Tan wrote: "One thing I'd watch: you now have two sources of truth in flight, PostgreSQL and Kafka. If the API crashes after writing to Postgres but before publishing, you've got an order that never gets processed. Have you considered using an outbox pattern or transactional writes to close that gap?" He was righ