From Network Failures to Offline Success: A Journey of Visible App

on YouTube ↗36m

" summary

Visible is a symptom-tracking app for long COVID and chronic fatigue that scales from a few dozen to ~20k users and hits massive network noise. Initial Hasura + GraphQL subscriptions + Hive caching produce chatty websockets, battery drain and flaky DNS errors. The team pivots to an offline-first model using SQLite via Drift, local UUID local IDs plus a queued action/synchronization system with background sync (Workmanager/iOS) and optimistic updates, cutting crashes and server bills while keeping the UI snappy.

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" chapters (13)

1. 0:00Introduction and speaker background
2. 1:48About Visible app and its purpose
3. 3:53Initial development and technical debt
4. 7:04Scaling challenges and network issues
5. 18:19Shift to offline-first approach
6. 21:31Choosing SQLite and local storage
7. 23:17Local ID generation and data model
8. 25:45Decoupling actions from network requests
9. 28:56Demo of offline-first functionality
10. 30:21Background synchronization process
11. 32:31Mindset shift on offline states
12. 33:32Results and benefits of the approach
13. 35:37Q&A and closing remarks

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