The chat app is a table-stakes feature for any dating app. A responsive and reliable messaging experience encourages users to stay on the platform for communications. This is desirable from a trust and safety standpoint, as abusive messages produced on the platform can be effectively moderated and proper actions can be promptly taken.

In this article, we will explore the design of an offline-first chat app on the OkCupid website, in particular, how we achieved responsiveness by implementing optimistic UI design patterns and reliability by incorporating a messages cache to support offline-mode.

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A finite state machine (FSM) is an architectural design pattern that allows us to model a large system as a collection of loosely coupled components. Each component in the system changes its behavior when the internal state changes. This pattern allows us to write flexible, reusable, and testable code. In this article, we will explore the use of FSM in building complex React components.

The primary use of FSM has been in programming embedded systems but in recent years, there has been an emergence of FSM in other applications like managing states in the browser, modeling behavior, and building chatbots. The goal of this post is not to evangelize FSM as a better state management solution than its alternatives like Redux but rather, to introduce a pattern for simplifying the architecture of a system and write robust code that is understandable, extendable, and delete-able.

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When I work at my federal job on a close intranet network, we often had to access information from different databases and filesystems through custom or share point websites which did not have the best user interface. It was a pain point for me and many of my colleagues. I decided to make a set of single page applications (SPAs) with nicer UX for querying the databases and file systems.

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LooseLeaf is a passion project and a startup I’ve been building while serving a 5 year commitment in the military. I’ve been creating prototypes and iterating on the concept of LooseLeaf since 2015.

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I’ve always lived by the “Separation of Concern” principle when it comes to software design. Recently, I’ve came to love a new design pattern for web apps called the isomorphic web app that sacrifices some of the simplicity of a SPA with a backend API for a significant boost in performance.

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