Devlog #2

session Flit could swallow things — text, links, files — but the only way to see what was in there was to keep poking it with curl. Functional, sure, but it felt like checking a mailbox by reaching in with my eyes closed. This time I wanted the moment that actually makes Flit worth building: you drop something on one device and it just appears on another, no refresh, no waiting.​

So I built the inbox page, and then I taught the server how to tap you on the shoulder.​

The tap is the fun part. My first thought was to have the page ask “anything new?” every couple of seconds, which works but always feels a half-step behind, and it hammers the server for nothing most of the time. WebSockets would do it, but that’s a full two-way phone line when all I need is the server occasionally shouting “hey, look!” down a one-way hallway. That’s exactly what Server-Sent Events are — plain HTTP, the browser reconnects on its own, and I get to keep the whole thing stupidly simple.​

Under the hood there’s a little broadcast channel. Whenever something gets stored, the server drops the new item’s id into the channel, and every browser that’s currently watching /api/events hears it and re-pulls the list. I left a 15-second background poll in there too, just as a safety net for the one time a connection quietly dies — belt and suspenders, because the entire promise of this thing is “it just shows up,” and I’d rather it be boringly reliable than clever.​

The first time it worked I had two terminals open. One sitting on curl -N /api/events, the other posting a note — and the event popped out the instant I hit enter, while the browser tab in the corner of my eye updated in the same breath. I may have said “oh, nice” out loud to an empty room.

Next I want the drop to land where my hands already are: auto-copy the newest text straight to the clipboard the second it arrives, and let old stuff quietly expire so there’s never anything to tidy up. That clipboard moment is the one I’m most excited about — it’s the whole difference between “a place I go to check” and “it’s already there.“​