Building an Event System With Wide Reaching Impacts
“Event driven” has definitely become a buzzword in recent years, but proper implementation can transform the interaction between systems and greatly improve the lives of your team members. It can help you migrate away from complex asynchronous jobs and simplify debugging processes when things go awry.
We have all been there — an error occurs in a complex workflow and we are stuck parsing through numerous logs across the entire workflow stack to understand the root cause of an error. With systems like this, the retry and error handling processes for jobs become immensely important to ensure that the workflow remains in sync and issues are addressed gracefully.
Enter an event system. Instead of complex workflows, you can now trigger specific actions when something occurs that you care about. These systems are great for interacting between services within your organization and also for your clients to use in their integrations with your product. At Brandfolder, we saw great client satisfaction when they integrated with our webhooks service.
Events also enabled us to build products and services that were infeasible before. A project I discuss in another post involved us building an integration platform that greatly enhanced our client’s experience with our add-on integration products. It was determined to be infeasible without events because the polling and data processing requirements did not seem worth the effort. When we were able to get an event notification about a specific asset in our system, we could then get to work on taking the correct action. Client’s integrations became effectively real-time and the process to build new integrations became much more simplified.
Simplicity was a key theme in the webhooks platform I built at Brandfolder — and is a theme that tends to apply well to many other software projects. By keeping things simple, the areas where things could go wrong was greatly reduced and we could adapt to changing needs without introducing unintended side-effects downstream.
Read more about the specific implementation of Brandfolder’s webhook platform here.
