Stop Using “Real Time” Wrong

Marianne Bellotti
4 min readJul 24, 2022

It has nothing to do with latency and it’s making your systems more complicated.

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I’m fighting this ongoing war with the phrase “real time” at work. I want to eliminate it from our vocabulary — to the point where I periodically fantasize about standing up a Slack bot that auto replies to the phrase “real time” with “did you mean to define a clear SLO?”

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Marianne Bellotti

Author of Kill It with Fire Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)