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Data & PerformanceTCE Website
Building a Unified College News Feed Without Department Fan-Out
This note is about choosing a denormalized read path so publishing can stay distributed while the homepage stays simple.
Problem
Departments needed independent publishing ownership, but the homepage still needed one recent feed for visitors.
Scanning every department for every homepage read would make the public feed harder to maintain and reason about.
Why It Was Difficult
Department autonomy and homepage simplicity pull in different directions.
The system needed a model that preserved local ownership while still supporting one global recent-feed surface.
Core Decision
Write department-local content and a global mirror together so the homepage reads unified feeds directly instead of scanning departments at request time.
Solution
Write each event or announcement to its department-local source and to a denormalized global mirror collection.
Let the homepage read the global mirrors directly instead of fan-out reads across departments.
Use separate mirror collections such as allEvents and allAnnouncements so the homepage path stays straightforward.
Impact
Department admins publish independently without forcing the homepage to aggregate cross-department reads each time.
Homepage reads stay simple and predictable.
The content architecture is easier to explain because ownership and aggregation are both explicit.
Tradeoff
Mirror drift, edits to trimmed items, and cleanup mismatches become real architectural risks.
Denormalization requires discipline to keep source and mirror collections aligned.
That tradeoff is acceptable because the read path is dramatically simpler for the homepage experience.
Ownership note
AI-assisted implementation. Architecture, decisions, tradeoffs, and UX ownership were mine.
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