1+ day, 8+ hour ago   (126+ words) [ EXECUTIVE TEARDOWN // TL;DR ] Scaling real-time is not about a faster socket. It is about making sure each event travels exactly as far as it needs to — and no further. For the single-server fundamentals and the React consumption side, see…...

6+ day, 7+ hour ago   (1082+ words) A broken monitoring dashboard is relatively easy to catch. A dashboard showing believable but incorrect numbers is much more dangerous. In my work on real-time communication systems, I have used WebRTC statistics to investigate connection quality, recovery behavior, and production…...

1+ week, 2+ day ago   (1207+ words) WebSocket is a communication protocol that enables full-duplex, bi-directional communication between a client and a server over a single, persistent connection built on top of TCP. Unlike the request-response model that defines regular HTTP traffic, where the client must always…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (617+ words) The worst kind of bug is the one your system doesn't report. A connection is open. No errors. No retries. No alerts. And somewhere in your data, there's a three-hour hole you only find out about later, if you're lucky…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (1291+ words) In Part 1, I reached one uncomfortable conclusion: But that created another question. How do I even know that a WebSocket connection has died? At first this sounded obvious. Surely if the client disappears, the server gets a disconnect event. Then…...

2+ week, 1+ hour ago   (1102+ words) Livestreams are great in the moment and surprisingly weak as archives. I ran into this problem in a very personal way. Earlier this year, I got back into chess after years of treating it as a casual family game. I…...

2+ week, 2+ day ago   (473+ words) There's a moment every engineer hits when building a real-time feature: you look at the WebSocket spec, think "okay, just a persistent TCP connection with a handshake," and start writing the server. Then a week later you're debugging a half-open…...