Dealing with Contention
🔒 Contention occurs when multiple processes compete for the same resource simultaneously. This could be booking the last concert ticket, bidding on an auction item, or any similar scenario. Without proper handling, you get race conditions, double-bookings, and inconsistent state. This pattern walks you through solutions from simple database transactions to more complex distributed coordination, showing when optimistic concurrency beats pessimistic locking and how to scale beyond single-node constraints.