One event, four destinations: how notifications fan out
· 9 min read
Your Genie finishes a long edit while you're staring at a different tab. Three things should happen at once: a toast slides in, a new item lands in your inbox so the news survives a reload, and — if you asked for it — your phone buzzes. None of the code that produced that message knows any of this. It raised one notification, passed a player and a string, and moved on.
That gap — between "something happened" and "the user finds out, in four different places" — is the small piece of the system that taught us the most about keeping a Rails app real-time.