Real-time Alerts

A platform generated events that people needed to act on quickly, but the only way to know about them was to refresh a page or wait for a daily email. Important events were missed, users kept the dashboard open all day just in case, and the team had no way to tell which notifications were actually useful.

I built the notification layer as a separate service. Backend events are published to a Node.js service on AWS that fans them out over WebSockets to connected React clients, which show in-app alerts and update status indicators live. Email is the fallback for users who are offline, and a preferences screen lets each user choose which event types they want and through which channel. Delivery and read state are stored so alerts survive reloads and reconnects.

Users find out about events within seconds instead of hours and no longer need to keep watching the dashboard. Because notifications are per user and configurable, alert fatigue stayed low, and the delivery data gave the team a clear view of which events people actually care about.