How I approach real-time UX (chat, live updates): WebSockets, auth/session boundaries, backpressure, and how to keep performance predictable in modern Next.js + Node.js systems.
Real-time features are never “just WebSockets”. The hard part is auth boundaries, state consistency, and protecting the system under load.
- Authenticate early (Clerk) and keep session logic explicit
- Apply backpressure: rate limits, queueing, and bounded fan-out
- Cache hot reads (Redis) and keep writes safe
- Observe everything: metrics and logs before you scale
- Keep the baseline site static and load the real-time module only when needed