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Designing AlloResto for a Connection That Might Not Be There

1 min read
  • architecture
  • offline-first
Concentric arcs radiating outward from a solid terracotta dot, evoking a sync signal reaching outward from a single source.

Restaurant floors don’t pause for a dropped connection, so neither can the software running them.

The design constraint

Every write has to succeed locally first, then reconcile. That single rule shapes almost everything downstream — data model, conflict resolution, even how we think about “real time.”

What changed in practice

  1. Local-first writes with a durable outbox.
  2. Last-writer-wins is not good enough for orders — we needed operation-level merge, not record-level.
  3. Sync status became a first-class UI concern, not an afterthought toast.

Offline-first isn’t a feature flag you bolt on. It’s a constraint you design the whole system around from day one.