Hybrid.Chat conversational platform

What I did

• Directed the product and wrote its integration, commercial and extensibility requirements.
• Chose to keep Botkit, adding sticky sessions and persisted conversation state for availability.
• Decided on the official WhatsApp vendor API and bought notifications rather than building them.

Skills

PythonNode.jsReactDocker ComposenpmAutomated TestingDartMongoDBRedisGraphQLPrismaAPI DesignMessage Queue DesignMulti-TenancyFunction CallingAgent OrchestrationRate LimitingAsynchronous ProcessingFault ToleranceSchema DesignCaching Strategies

Stories

2021 · Hybrid.Chat conversational platform

High availability for a bot runtime that insisted on being in memory

Situation

The chatbot platform's runtime holds conversation state in memory, so under high availability any pod restart dropped live conversations.

Task

Survive pod churn without rewriting the conversational runtime the product was built on.

Action

I checked alternative frameworks, found the same limit, and kept the runtime: sticky sessions, state persisted to Mongo, and Redis pub/sub to close duplicates.

Result

The platform ran multi-container with state surviving restarts, and the design documented its failure modes, including those the fix introduced.

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2023 · Hybrid.Chat conversational platform

Wanting to build it in house and buying instead

Situation

The bot platform needed web push notifications, and my instinct was to build it in house for future flexibility.

Task

Decide between building and buying, separating engineering reasons from personal preference.

Action

I wrote down what I wanted from in-house, weighed it against what the release needed, and recorded the preference and the decision against it.

Result

We shipped on the vendor, and the recorded trade-off made later customisation questions easy to answer.

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