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2021 — 2023Frontend Engineer
{ real-time UI }

Real-time push notification product

A live notifications product where Ag-Grid had to render thousands of events per second without dropping frames.

1000s
events/sec rendered
200ms → 0
scroll jank fixed
—
dropped frames

I came onto this product to keep the UI fast under load. The use case was a live feed of notification events — thousands per second on a busy tenant — rendered in a sortable, filterable grid that operators were watching in real time.

I worked alongside backend on the delivery contract, optimised the Ag-Grid render budget, and gradually unwound the patterns that had grown into 200ms scroll jank. I learned that performance is a feature and that 'just rerender it' is the most expensive sentence in frontend.

{ what I did }
  • Profiled and unwound rerender storms in a busy Ag-Grid integration.
  • Co-designed the real-time delivery contract with the backend team.
  • Built virtualization budgets that survived mobile + desktop in parallel.
{ lessons }
  • Performance is the invisible feature: nobody thanks you when it's fast, but everyone leaves when it's slow.
  • Memoization without measurement is just superstition.
{ stack }
  • React
  • JavaScript
  • Ag-Grid
  • Real-time
  • Performance
{ further reading }