Thursday
Room 2
13:40 - 14:40
(UTC+02)
Talk (60 min)
Offline-first Architecture - How to survive without the internet?
On a beautiful summer day in 2020, Entur’s entire sales system went down, leaving all of Norway unable to purchase train tickets. But did we let the Norwegian people travel for free on that fateful day?
Perhaps a few, but not all! Those who managed to board a train still had to pay for tickets via the app used by train conductors.
So how do you go about developing a robust application which can withstand downtime in the backend systems, and act as a backup in case of critical failures? How do you build something that survives without the internet?
A potential solution to this challenge is offline-first architecture, a design principle which assumes the lack of internet connectivity as the default state in software development.
During this presentation, we’ll share our insights from building a complex ticketing application based on offline-first architecture, discuss the challenges encountered along the way, and highlight some of the solutions we’ve discovered.
This talk is relevant for developers of all backgrounds, as our primary focus is on architectural principles rather than specific programming languages and tools.
Zi Liu
Zi worked as a software developer and team lead for Team Ombord at Entur, and has as a result worked extensively with building an offline-first application for the Norwegian public transportation system. Team Ombord is part of the reason you have to (sometimes) pay fines when you forget to buy tickets on public transportation...even when there is no internet. Even when the backend systems are down.
Ahlam Aatif
Ahlam is a software developer currently working for team reiseinfo at Ruter. Other than making sure that people are fined when they're caught without a valid ticket (I'm terribly sorry), she enjoys bouldering during her freetime (even though she's kinda scared of heights).