How I Scaled Real-Time Document Sync to 50+ Concurrent Users Without Merge Conflicts The Problem: Why Real-Time Editing Is a Nightmare (Without CRDTs) Let me paint a scenario that keeps distributed systems engineers up at night: User A opens a task in TaskFlow and starts typing: "Design API schema". User B opens the same task at the exact same millisecond and types: "Implement auth layer". What happens next? On a standard WebSocket connection with a central server deciding truth, one user's changes get overwritten. Data is lost. Trust is broken . This is the race condition problem. For decades, platforms like Google Docs solved it with Operational Transformation (OT) — a clever but brittle algorithm that requires the server to maintain the canonical "state" and compute diffs. One mistake in the transformation function? Corrupted data across millions of users.…