mkalam-alami
commented
5 years ago Technical notes
Currently we're using "pull" notifications rather than "push", ie. it's upon loading a page on Alakajam that we look for notifications to present (and cache them for performance reasons, unless certain actions like a comment explicitly invalidate the cache). I'm still undecided whether it's something we should change to actually have a notification table of sorts that gets populated with new lines every time something we're subscribed to happens.
Anyway, if we stick to the current approach, we could use the fact that post & game notifications don't need to be as instantaneous as for comments:
- Posts notifications = All posts created after the
user.notifications_last_readtime for which we're subscribed to the author. - Event notifications = All games created after the
user.notifications_last_readtime for which we're subscribed to the author. Maybe filter out events based onevent.updated_at>user.notifications_last_readfor additional optimization (that means notifications will be received only when game submissions are closed). - Caching = Remains global for all notifications. Keep invalidating the cache when new notified comments arrive, but don't bother invalidating caches when posts/games are created. The cache TTL is currently set to 10mn, it can probably stay that way for now as the 2 new queries won't be expensive.
Additional work will be:
- Creating a
followtable - Actually supporting follows/unfollows on user profiles
- Showing Twitter-like lists of following/followers (at least we should give a way to list the people we follow)
- Ensuring that the
post.created_at,entry.created_at(andevent.updated_atif we use it) columns are indexed - Supporting the listing of posts and games in the activity feed
It would be nice to be able to follow a user. If this user then submits a game or a post I get a notification. This would allow to play the games of a user you enjoyed in previous jams more easily.