In Pursuit of the Ideal Developer Experience

Short summary

Building Epiq, a Git-based terminal issue tracker, revealed unexpected complexity in distributed state sync that stretched a two-week estimate to seven months. The author scrapped months of work to adopt event sourcing for merge-conflict resilience. Final unsolved challenge: harmonizing concurrent user logs using ULIDs without a central broker.

• •Epiq is a terminal-first issue tracker built on Git; initial two-week estimate became seven months of development
• •Author rewrote persistence layer twice, eventually adopting event sourcing to solve distributed merge-conflict problems
• •Distributed clock synchronization remains the final blocker: ULIDs alone insufficient for consistent concurrent edits

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