Taming Eventual Consistency: Evolving State Management in Distributed Systems

📅 Date: April 20, 2026

🎙️ Speaker: Shervin Sotoodeh – Senior Software Engineer at DraftKings

🔐 About the event:

The event will be in English.

This talk explores real-world challenges of state management in distributed systems, focusing on eventual consistency issues encountered with cookie-based state handling and how the architecture evolved using Passport and Heartbeat to improve reliability and correctness.

We will walk through the architectural trade-offs, failure modes, and lessons learned while operating at scale — including where theoretical guarantees diverge from production realities.

This session is ideal for architects and engineers designing distributed systems, providing practical insights into consistency models, state ownership, and resilient system design.

📋 Agenda:

• Discussion of state management challenges in distributed systems
• Transition from JWE-based approaches to Passport and heartbeat-driven mechanisms
• Architectural trade-offs and failure modes
• Lessons learned from production environments
• Q&A session

🚩 Sponsor: DraftKings

📅 When: April 20th, 7:30 PM

👥 User Group: Software Architecture User Group – https://dev.bg/groups/software-architecture/

🔗 More info & registration: https://dev.bg/event/taming-eventual-consistency-evolving-state-management-in-distributed-systems/

About the speaker:

Shervin Sotoodeh is a Senior Software Engineer at DraftKings, specializing in designing and scaling resilient, high-performance backend distributed systems. He focuses on fault-tolerant systems that support millions of users in real time.

His expertise includes distributed systems architecture, state management, and consistency models. He led initiatives to improve reliability and correctness in production by evolving state management strategies, transitioning from JWE-based approaches to Passport and heartbeat-driven mechanisms to solve eventual consistency challenges.

Shervin is passionate about bridging theory and practice, turning complex architectural trade-offs into pragmatic and scalable solutions, mentoring engineers, and promoting engineering best practices.

🎟️ The event is free, but pre-registration is required.