Building CreatorModo: Backend Architecture (Part 1 - High Level Design)
Hello again. Hope the intro post didn't put you to sleep. Last time I gave you the trailer: what I'm building, why I'm building it, and a high-level skim of the stack. This time we actually open the hood, specifically on the backend, because that's where most of the real engineering happened. And, not coincidentally, where most of my regrets currently live. Here's the diagram from before, since we're about to walk through every arrow on it. Why Two Backend Services Instead of One? The obvious move would've been one FastAPI app doing everything: receiving webhooks, validating them, saving automations, processing events, firing DMs. One repo, one deploy, one service to monitor at 3am. I didn't do that. On purpose. Instagram doesn't send you webhooks politely. It sends them whenever it wants, as many as it wants, and it expects a fast response or it starts retrying — which means duplicate events, which means duplicate DMs, which means creators...