Designing a Notification System That Doesn't Fall Apart

Short summary

A practical guide to designing notification systems that scale reliably. Key principles: decouple notifications from business logic using event-driven architecture, queue notifications for async processing, track message lifecycle states, use the Strategy pattern for pluggable channels, and respect user preferences per category. The article covers failure handling and provider abstraction.

• •Decouple notifications from critical request paths using events and queues
• •Track notification lifecycle states (pending, queued, sent, failed) for debugging
• •Use Strategy pattern for pluggable multi-channel delivery and respect per-category user preferences

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