I loved meteorjs and its still my fav framework to this day.

Seeing optimistic ui and browser based databases being used this way makes me happy.

I would like to understand how they do the chunking and only updating part of the graph instead all of it.

Yes, I spent a few months. But it worth it. Every new field, model I need to add, it is so straightforward. I do love frameworks and foundations. They make live easier later by a lot.

300ms seems like a lot. Even if this includes the whole http request+response it still seems unbelievably long.

"A few milliseconds is all it takes to update an issue in Linear. A traditional CRUD app doing the same thing takes about 300ms."

"Any data sent between the client and server costs hundreds of milliseconds."

There’s no solving the problem of a large RTT between an HTTP client and server when it’s due to the speed of light.

But what you can do is locate the backend near users and make sure it’s fast.

For example, it’s very possible to run a web app backend within ~10ms RTT of most users and have the backend render responses within ~10ms too.

In other words, you can absolutely create a traditional CRUD app where doing the same thing takes more like 30ms, not 300ms.

https://github.com/tinyplex/tinybase seems kinda good maybe?

Bottom line is, if your app's content is behind a login screen, just use client side rendering. It is way lower complexity and a way better user experience.

https://github.com/wzhudev/reverse-linear-sync-engine/blob/m...

One thing I would like to point out though is that building a performant sync engine that behaves the way you would like in most cases is a non-trivial thing.

If two users are offline and add, edit, remove issues and come online again, you need to reason about what happens. Sometimes you can get away with Last Writer Wins but what happens if an issue is deleted and then edited. What happens if an item in a list gets re-ordered differently on different clients, what's the final ordering? In which cases can you merge what state and in which do you need to discard something. Do you show a conflict resolution UI? How do you deal with rollbacks. How do you deal with schema drift and updates on items that would be affected by schema drift? Business logic might change between being reconnects. FK constraints can shift. Can you set up your data and the sync engine so that it only syncs the minimum amount of changes and batches them correctly during longer offline sessions so you don't fire 5000 change requests after reconnecting?

I recently had to implement local first + remote sync on some fairly complex dynamic forms and where luckily there is usually only one writer and I can get away with last writer wins and reject if things are too old or if there is schema drift and can just display an error message and roll back. But what I am trying to say is: Whatever can go wrong in an online-first world, can also go wrong in an offline first world but you might get informed of that all at once at a later time - or not at all and your data is not what you think it should be. Some sync engines like zero from rocicorp has opted out of supporting offline writes entirely because of all these problems.

And just to be clear: I love offline first approaches. I yearn for fast performance. And in a lot of cases slapping a sync engine on your app can really be helpful for that if your use case allows it. But it's absolutely crucial to be aware of the pitfalls that come with it.

This is basically a thick client, and comes with according trade-offs. It's interesting and there are some best practices, but I can't help but feeling that either the author is a huge fan or the post is an ad (or "sponsored").

He chose the path to a better product rather than the path to a quick buck. That is definitely odd for a silicon valley startup

I am genuinely impressed with their engineering and design — I aspire to attain these levels, though I lack not only the skills, but also several zeroes in my bank account, I think. Still, it's worth looking at what they do and try to get there!

Big props and kudos to the Linear team. It's an impressive app.

IMO a good approach is to update the UI immediately but still show some indication that the operation hasn't completed. So in a chat app, for example, add the message to the list of messages, but with contrast reduced slightly to indicate that other people can't see it yet.

He creates a task called "Create faster app launch", if we believe the article, it's processing that locally rather than going via the server, and then it's allocated an ID "BRO-5". That the ID is so low suggests it's just adding one to the previous issue ID, and so under heavy load, there are almost certainly going to be conflicts with other users creating tasks and getting identical IDs. Even if the system resolves this by changing one of those IDs, the system shouldn't be presenting the ID to the user until it is guaranteed unique. What if they've already pasted it into a document when the system notices the collision and renumbers it?

[1] https://media.performance.dev/posts/p_gAMR6Z7y49Fp/NZrXs70M_...