Ian Macartney

Agents rely on long-lived workflows, but when happens when they fail midway through? Here are the tools you need to manage correctness and reliability: transactions, idempotency, retries, durable functions, journaling, and state machines. The missing abstraction layer for agentic is durable workflows, which bring them all together.

With this new backend component, augment Agents to automatically save and search message history per-thread, providing realtime results across multiple tabs and users. Use it with the Workflow component to run reliably with retries and durability across server restarts.

I reimplemented Mastra’s agentic workflows with durable functions in Convex, and it was the wrong decision. Look at three common strategies (reimplementation, API wrapping, and “blessed” plugin paths), along with learnings along the way and reflections on what I’d do differently next time. TL;DR: Do less, do it smarter, and prototype faster.

Learn how to self-host Convex, the reactive database and backend. This guide covers setup with Docker, Fly.io, and Neon.tech, plus pros and cons of self-hosting vs. cloud hosting.

Or how I learned to love BlockNote, Tiptap and ProseMirror OT sync.

Learn about Automerge CRDTs for collaborative editing, syncing changes using Convex.

Convex Components enable an ecosystem of powerful building blocks to reduce the amount of code you have to write and maintain yourself. Geospatial search, Expo push notifications, LaunchDarkly feature flags, durable function workflows, and more.

You can test functions that rely on a sign-in by decoding your JWT and using the fields with "Act as a user" on the dashboard.

Learn the basics of HTTP streaming with Convex by re-implementing OpenAI's SDK using built-in fetch and async iterators. No npm dependencies needed.

When people want a full-stack framework, what they really want is an opinionated backend that interoperates seamlessly with their frontends in a way that empowers full-stack developers to easily build apps that can scale.

Implementing application rate limiting when you have fast access to a database with strong ACID guarantees. Token bucket and fixed window, with fairness, burst accommodation and fire-and-forget support.

Compare push-based load balancing with pull-based work stealing as scalable strategies for distributing resource-intensive workloads, such as running LLM models for AI apps.

Implementing "work stealing" - a workload distribution strategy - using Convex's reactive database.

Online migrations in Convex using mutations, including a Convex Component to manage them.

This post will cover various aspects of operational maturity, and steps to take as your app grows up.

Learn about best practices for testing your full-stack apps - running on Convex or elsewhere!

By setting up dedicated tools, you can get actionable data to help understanding errors, performance, user behavior and allow you respond quickly when things change.

Before you burden yourself with “best practices” for large-scale companies, focus on what will reduce your feedback cycles and help you ship early and often. Think about your use case, not your toolbox.

Patch all of your data in your database table with the bulk edit feature on the Convex dashboard, without writing migration code.

ESLint is a powerful tool that goes beyond simply type checking. We go over how to set it up and implement some basic workflows with the

As your app grows from tens to hundreds to thousands of users, there are some techniques that will keep your database queries snappy and efficient. I’ve put together a short list of the most common techniques used by teams scaling on Convex.

Advice and resources for session tracking per-tab or per-browser via localStorage / sessionStorage using React Context, hooks, and some utilities to make your life easier.

If you have a more specific type than what you can express with Convex validators, you can still document that at the type level in Convex by casting once in your schema definition.

Traverse database relationships in a readable, predictable, and debuggable way. Support for one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many via utility functions available in convex-helpers.

Use Zod with TypeScript for argument validation on your server functions allows you to both protect against invalid data, and define TypeScript types that propagate to your client. This can now be used as an alternative to the built-in argument validation on Convex.

Re-use code and centralize request handler definitions with discoverability and type safety and without the indirection of middleware or nesting of wrappers. Use the new customFunction module in convex-helpers for your Convex TypeScript functions.

Now that we've launched Preview Deployments on Convex, you can test out backend changes easier than ever. But you may want to seed your project with data first, so let's go over how to do that.

It's never been a better time to make your own town of AIs.

Stream GPT responses without brittle browser-based HTTP streaming. Multiplayer reactivity, persistence, reactivity via Convex. Using OpenAI’s Node SDK server-side, and Convex's useQuery hook client-side.

Pinecone and Convex are a good match when you're looking to build an application that leverages embeddings and also has application data.

Embeddings, why they’re useful, and how we can store and use them in Convex.

In this post we’ll look at some patterns for structuring relationships in the Convex database.

There are as many ways to migrate data as there are databases, but here’s some basic information to set the stage.

Did you know you can use the Convex Dashboard to run functions, enter seed data, filter & delete data, upload files, and more?

In this post, we’ll look at how to use the moderation API to flag messages before sending them to Chat-GPT, and patterns for handling these errors in a full-stack React app.

How to store multiple personalities Convex and provide them to the chatGPT API, enabling changing personalities mid-conversation. This is a follow-up to Building a full-stack ChatGPT app.

Let's build a full-stack chat app to talk to ChatGPT on its new API!

Implement asynchronous job patterns using a table to track progress. Fire-and-forget, cancelation, timeouts, and more.

Getting users to sign up for a new service before seeing any benefits is challenging. In this post, we looked at a couple of strategies for managing user information without requiring a login.

Use Convex to fetch an image from OpenAI’s image generation service based on a user-provided prompt.

Building multiplayer games requires a lot of synchronization logic and event systems. However, using Convex, we get a lot of this for free! Follow along here as we build a complex multiplayer game on Convex, leveraging its reactive-by-default queries, transactional mutations, backend storage, and scheduled functions.

An approach to server-persisted session data with Convex, wrapping your server functions and storing a session ID on the client.

Function validation is important for a production app because you can’t always control which clients are talking to your server. See how to use zod to validate your Convex functions, using our withZod wrapper.

Using wrapper functions like withUser can help you organize your code into middleware-like blocks that you can compose to keep your function logic concise.

Some patterns for incorporating presence into a web app leveraging Convex, and sharing some tips & utilities I built along the way.

For write-heavy applications, use single flighting to dynamically throttle requests. See how we implement this with React hooks for Convex.

Today we’re going to talk about how to flip features on and off remotely using a clever use of the reactive nature of Convex queries.