Project Four
Placeholder. A mobile experience backed by resilient, event-driven services that scale with demand.
A fast-growing service needed a mobile app that stayed responsive under heavy demand. I led the app and the event-driven backend behind it, designed to stay calm during traffic spikes.
Demand arrived in sharp bursts. The previous app froze when the backend struggled, and a failure in one area could cascade into the whole experience.
How it came together
Design for failure
Split the backend into independent services connected by events, so one slow part could never block the rest.
Offline-first mobile
Built the app to work from local data first and sync in the background, so it feels instant even on poor networks.
Observe everything
Added tracing, metrics and alerts from day one, so problems were found before users noticed them.
Built to stay calm under load
A simplified view of the architecture: requests enter through a gateway, services stay independent and talk over events, and telemetry watches every layer.
What shipped
- Offline-first with background sync
- Live updates over event streams
- Push notifications with smart batching
- Autoscaling services
- End-to-end tracing and alerts
- Staged rollouts and feature flags
“Traffic spikes used to wake us up. Now we watch them on a graph and keep drinking our coffee.”