Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

Founding Typescript Engineer Wanted: Build the Next Realtime Database

2025-04-12

InstantDB, a real-time database for the frontend, is hiring a founding Typescript Engineer to join their four-person team in San Francisco. The ideal candidate is obsessed with type ergonomics, enjoys crafting delightful UIs, and wants to build a sync engine to power the next Figma or Notion. The role involves improving Typescript types, UI enhancements, and optimizing the sync engine's performance, offering a challenging and rewarding opportunity.

Browser Databases: The Future of Frontend Sync?

2025-03-21

Niki explores the challenges of data synchronization in modern web applications. Traditional tools like XHR, fetch, REST, and GraphQL only solve the problem of getting data once, failing to address the complexities of continuous changes, request failures, and data conflicts. The article argues that building a browser-based database offers a more effective solution to data synchronization. This not only simplifies the development process and improves efficiency but also provides more reliable and efficient data management, ultimately allowing developers to focus on business logic rather than low-level data synchronization details. Using Roam Research as an example, the author demonstrates the feasibility of a serverless architecture and believes that sync engines have the potential to simplify the tech stack, consolidating databases and servers, and fundamentally changing frontend development.

Zero-Downtime PostgreSQL Major Version Upgrade

2025-01-29

The Instant team shares their experience upgrading PostgreSQL from version 13 to 16 with zero downtime. They tried in-place upgrades and blue-green deployments, but both failed. Their manual approach involved creating a new PostgreSQL 16 replica, gradually switching subscriptions and writes, and cleverly designing an algorithm to ensure zero data loss by briefly pausing new transactions. They encountered challenges like custom function search path issues and sequence data replication problems, sharing valuable lessons learned along the way.