44/60 Days System Design Questions

Short summary

A field-service app shipped offline mode but synced writes conflicted and crashes occurred on schema upgrades. Four architectural approaches span from localStorage simplicity to CRDT sophistication; the CRDT option (Automerge/Yjs) is production-proven by Linear, Figma, and Notion. System design challenge with real incident analysis.

• •Real incident: offline technician writes lost to last-write-wins; another crashed on IndexedDB schema mismatch
• •Four options: localStorage+diff (simple), vector clocks (conflict-aware), versioned IndexedDB (auditable), CRDT (merge-proof)
• •CRDT is production choice for collaborative tools—structural guarantee against conflicts

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