What a Ledger Taught a Generation of Engineers
Double-entry bookkeeping is six hundred years old and still the best distributed systems primer we have.
By Lena Vogel
Immutability, before it was fashionable
An append-only log where every entry balances against another is not a design pattern someone invented at a conference. It is how money has been tracked since the Venetian merchants.
Engineers who learn the ledger first write better financial software. They stop trying to update a balance and start recording what happened.
A balance is a derived value. Treat it as stored state and you will spend your career chasing drift.