Description

In this episode we went deep on realtime systems beyond the usual “just use WebSockets” advice. We talked about why “realtime notifications” is a better umbrella term, the real tradeoffs between polling, WebSockets, and gRPC/gRPC-web, and why protocol choice should not leak into your customer-facing API.

That led into a bigger conversation about abstractions: how to make an interface simple without hiding the important constraints, and when “powerful” abstractions become easy to abuse. From there we jumped into modern cloud building workflows, the never-ending declarative vs imperative debate, and what it takes to support both “just deploy my container” simplicity and the full expressiveness of something like Wing.

We also used Momento as a concrete example: pub/sub from the browser, scoped access to shared resources, and patterns that let you ship fast without turning your architecture into a science project.