Engineering

How we build alfred_

War stories and architecture deep-dives from the team. The hard problems, what we tried, what broke, and what actually works.

Engineering From Minutes to Seconds: Rebuilding Email Ingress Around Real-Time How we rebuilt alfred_'s email ingestion layer from a polling cron into real-time push across Gmail, Outlook, and IMAP, and why we talked ourselves out of the obvious fix. Jun 23, 2026 9 min read