GUN — Decentralized database. Five things I wish I had known

I have been getting into developing applications with gun. It is a really cool decentralized, streaming database. It’s super fun to play around with. For a big project it does require a lot of extra work to get working properly. But all in all, I would recommend trying it out!

If you do start out fiddling with gun beyond the small example code, this article contains what I wish someone would have told me before I got started! So here you go : )

Watch values. Dont read too much.

Gun is a streaming database. It streams in data. You will want to work with this, not against it. Don’t rely too much on reading off values from gun, then doing a bunch of stuff without gun, and trying to put the values back into it…. Maybe better with an example:

// Dont do this
let info = {name: "loading..."};
gun.get("info").get("name").once(name => info.name = name);

// And then later...
info.name = "updated name";

// And then even later...
gun.get("info").get("name").put(info.name);

This might work fine when name is just a single value being read. But weird things will start to happen once you begin building up objects from these values, or passing info around thinking it has some value that you’ve read at a particular point in time…