In this episode, I was joined by Tomek Masternak and Szymon Pobiega from Particular Software (NServiceBus) for a technical discussion about the Outbox Pattern! The pattern is designed to improve reliability of messaging by storing outgoing messages in a database table (the “outbox”) as part of the same transaction that modifies business data - allowing a separate process to read and publish those messages to a message broker.

Tomek’s bio

Technology geek passionate about the design and development of software systems. Interested in distributed, message-based architectures and technology in general. Likes to know if systems work correctly, how they fail, and what that even means in the first place. Co-author at https://exactly-once.github.io/.

Szymon’s bio

Szymon works an engineer at Particular Software, the makers of NServiceBus. His main areas of expertise are Domain-Driven Design and asynchronous messaging. He is especially interested in the intersection of these two topics – in the patterns and tools for ensuring all messages are processed exactly once and in the correct order.

Szymon is a co-author of https://exactly-once.github.io/, a website dedicated to all things related to messaging.

In his free time Szymon plays with Lego, building models of real-life off-road vehicles.

Contact links

• Tomek on LinkedIn
• Szymon on LinkedIn
• Tomek on X-Twitter
• Szymon on X-Twitter
• Joint blog written by both Tomek and Syzmon

Links from the show

• Workshop material on GitHub
• Oskar’s post on implementing Outbox using PostgreSQL
• Jimmy Bogard @ NDC London 2025: Consistency and Agreements in Distributed Systems
• Some outbox flavours:
  • Async/bach
  • HTTP triggered (NServiceBus, Dapr)

From dev picks section

• Zero-G flights
• Readwise invite link (gives an extra 1-month free trial)
• Onyx Boox Go 6

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