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Pulse.
Real-time product analytics with sub-second queries over billions of events.
Year
2024
Role
Design & Backend Lead
Timeline
6 months
Status
In production
Stack
01 — Overview
Pulse is the analytics platform I always wished Vertex had — a real-time dashboard where product teams ask questions of billions of events and get answers before their coffee cools. Every chart streams live, every query lands under a second.
02 — The challenge
Traditional analytics stacks batch events into warehouse tables and answer minutes — sometimes hours — late. Product teams were making yesterday’s decisions with yesterday’s data, and the existing real-time options priced themselves out of reach for a mid-stage company.
03 — Approach
- Designed a ClickHouse materialized-view schema that pre-aggregates the ninety percent of queries teams actually ask
- Built a WebSocket fan-out layer that pushes live updates to every open dashboard without polling
- Wrote a query planner that rewrites ad-hoc questions into the pre-aggregated shapes, with graceful fallback
- Shipped a dashboard UI where every chart updates in place — no spinners, no refresh, no jumping layouts
04 — The outcome
Pulse now ingests 1.2 billion events a day across 40+ customer workspaces and holds a p95 query latency of 180ms. It replaced two third-party tools and became the single source of truth for product reviews.