Tidepool
A calmer inbox for dev teams. Fewer pings, more flow — and a Friday afternoon that actually feels like one.
- YEAR
- 2025
- ROLE
- Lead engineer
- TEAM
- 4 humans, 1 dog
- LIVE
- tidepool.app ↗
01 — THE ITCH
Our team was drowning in notifications. Every tool wanted our attention, and the important stuff got lost between a CI alert and a meme.
We didn't want another dashboard. We wanted one quiet place that knew what mattered — and could wait politely for everything else.
02 — WHAT WE BUILT
A single inbox that pulls from GitHub, Slack, and your deploy pipeline, then sorts it into three piles: now, today, and whenever. No AI magic claims — just a small set of rules the team writes together.
I led the backend and the sync engine, and argued (lovingly) for keeping the rules human-readable.
03 — THE HARD PART
Sync. Always sync. Three APIs, three ideas of what "updated" means, and one very long week where every message showed up twice. We rebuilt the engine around an append-only log, and the duplicates politely disappeared.
Alireeza is the rare engineer who makes the room calmer when things break.
04 — WHAT I LEARNED
- Boring architecture is a feature, not a phase.
- Rules written by the whole team get followed by the whole team.
- Ship the quiet version first. Loud features can wait.