Engineering at Tallyfy means the people side of building a workflow product, not "Engineering" as a topic for a general-business audience. The posts here are written by the Tallyfy engineering team for other engineers and product folk: design decisions we've made and the trade-offs we accepted, infrastructure choices that worked or didn't, and operating habits that scale a small team without hiring our way out of every problem. Expect concrete posts on form validation, watch permissions, BPMN versus simpler conditional rules, magic links, the rules engine we built and called Sherlock, and the swimlane problem we keep running into when customers try to model their own processes. If you're building a workflow product or evaluating one, the engineering posts give you the unvarnished view from inside.
Hand-picked starting points if you're new to engineering.
The biggest problem in workflow software was never technical. It was getting team agreement on who does what. This 2017 insight at Tallyfy shaped eight years of product decisions.
Building Tallyfy Sherlock, an if-this-then-that rules engine for workflow automation, from April 2018. The internal debates, the disagreements on scope, and why testing rules before deployment became the defining feature.
Tallyfy rejected BPMN notation in April 2017 after internal debates showed flowcharts fail on mobile devices. The if-this-then-that rule system replaced traditional process notation, and the unreleased Flowtable concept shaped how the product handles process data density.
Sometimes you need to bundle tasks together without the overhead of creating a template first. Tallyfy built ad-hoc processes using a single API parameter flag to handle exactly this scenario for operations teams.
Most Tallyfy users never open the Advanced tab. Settings like guest assignment, skip rules, and completion windows evolved from a 2016 proposal by Pravina into features that deeply change how work flows through an organization.
AI can generate workflow steps, but Tallyfy engineering found it misses 50-70% of what makes a process useful. Form fields, automations, and context-specific logic still need human design.
The internal story of building AI template generation at Tallyfy. AI creates steps but misses 50 to 70 percent of template value. Real GitHub issues, real performance data, and why human oversight is non-negotiable.
After an attacker sent 10,000+ phishing emails through our system, we rebuilt how we think about API security. The patterns we learned: database-based rate limiting, tenant validation on every request, and why Redis alone is not enough.
How Tallyfy built dynamic task assignment rules based on form field values from 2017 through 2019. The Nashville problem, the guest email question, and why Assign and Assign Only became two different operations.
Every workflow tool claims audit trails. Tallyfy built compliance-grade audit logging after real SOC 2 and ISO 27001 security assessments revealed what auditors actually check. One law firm doubled case capacity per attorney with proper audit trails. The gap between activity history and compliance-grade audit trails is wider than most teams expect.
When a large enterprise needed to translate English playbooks to save millions in translation costs, we built Azure Cognitive Services integration covering 838 translation keys across 7 languages. Here is what we learned.
Tallyfy rejected BPMN notation in April 2017 after internal debates showed flowcharts fail on mobile devices. The if-this-then-that rule system replaced traditional process notation, and the unreleased Flowtable concept shaped how the product handles process data density.
Why the moment between clicking a button and seeing a result matters more than most teams realize. The Material Design team led by Matias Duarte at Google showed that feedback within 100ms is critical. Pre-click hover effects and post-click feedback shape whether software feels alive or dead.
The internal design debates at Tallyfy on conditional visibility for workflow steps since 2016. Why step-level rules beat process-level rules, and how to visualize conditionals without becoming a flowchart tool.
In October 2017, Tallyfy designer Thomas sketched a three-option Create button on a whiteboard. Why a single prominent action beats scattered options, and how color and hierarchy drive user behavior.
Tallyfy used TinyColor brightness detection to build CSS-driven branding that lets organizations customize logos and colors on guest-facing workflows without creating unreadable text or broken interfaces.
When you change a workflow template, what happens to the 47 processes already running? Most tools force you to choose: freeze your template or risk breaking active work. Tallyfy built a dual-version system where draft edits never touch the published version that running processes depend on.
How Tallyfy built deadline rules that calculate task due dates from form field values. A customer on a 100% discount forced this feature, resulting in four distinct rule types and months of timezone debugging.
What users see when there is nothing to see reveals product philosophy. At Tallyfy, reducing 47 features to three initial choices taught us that empty states are the highest-stakes design moment in any workflow tool.
What happens to Tallyfy task assignments when someone leaves? Force reassignment transfers all active tasks to the admin who disabled the member. Completed tasks keep the original owner for audit trail purposes.
Building real-time validation at Tallyfy that tells users what is wrong before they hit save. The internal debates on extensibility, custom rules, and why an infinite set of validations forced us to think differently.
After seven years of iteration starting in 2016, we discovered that mixing workflow rule types in Sherlock creates unpredictable conflicts. The solution was four independent types: visibility, assignment, deadline, and status rules that execute in parallel.
The surprisingly tricky problem of email identity for external workflow participants. At Tallyfy, when someone clicks Forgot Guest Link, the system must resolve 4 possible identity states to determine if they are a guest, a member, or both across different organizations.
Kanban boards look beautiful in demos. Three columns, cards moving left to right, visual satisfaction. But when you have 10+ task states, multiple processes running simultaneously, and people need to edit data inline, the card metaphor falls apart. At Tallyfy, we learned this the hard way.
The design philosophy behind letting external people participate in your workflows without accounts or passwords. Pravina and the engineering team at Tallyfy share real debates, sketches, and security lessons from building guest access since October 2016.
Not every change deserves an immediate email. At Tallyfy, we designed three notification frequencies: Electric, Mindful, and Chilled to give watchers control over their own inbox load. The tension between real-time updates and respectful batching shaped everything about how we aggregate and deliver watching notifications.
How Tallyfy designed magic link authentication for single-click process initiation from email. No login wall. The 6-step token validation chain behind public kickoff forms shows why anonymous form submissions required rethinking security assumptions.
