Real-Time Updates: Definition, Examples & Best Practices (2025)

How Real-time Updates Works

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Understanding Real-time Updates

Automatic synchronization of information that occurs immediately when changes are made to the source data or system This concept is fundamental to modern documentation practices and helps teams create more effective documentation.

Keeping Documentation Current with Real-Time Updates

When your software or systems implement real-time updates, your documentation needs to keep pace. Technical teams often record training sessions or demos showing how real-time features work in action—capturing timestamps when data refreshes, explaining websocket connections, or demonstrating live dashboards updating as events occur.

However, video demonstrations of real-time updates quickly become problematic for knowledge sharing. Team members must scrub through recordings to find specific implementation details, and these videos can't be easily searched for technical specifics like polling intervals or event-driven architecture patterns. When your real-time functionality changes, entire videos become outdated.

Converting these videos to searchable documentation solves this challenge by extracting the critical technical details about your real-time update mechanisms. Your documentation can highlight code examples showing event listeners, explain the architecture behind your real-time data flow, and provide troubleshooting guidance—all in an easily updatable format. When you implement changes to your real-time updates system, you can quickly revise specific sections rather than re-recording entire training sessions.

Discover how to transform your video explanations of real-time features into searchable, maintainable documentation →

Real-World Documentation Use Cases

Implementing Real-time Updates in Documentation

Problem

Teams struggle with consistent documentation practices

Solution

Apply Real-time Updates principles to standardize approach

Implementation

Start with templates and gradually expand

Expected Outcome

More consistent and maintainable documentation

Best Practices

✓ Start Simple with Real-time Updates

Begin with basic implementation before adding complexity

✓ Do: Create clear guidelines

✗ Don't: Over-engineer the solution

Real-time Updates

Quick Definition