The Seven Engineering Problems That Make Real-Time Enterprise Sync Almost Impossible

I spent 18 months trying to make two databases agree with each other. Not eventually. Not within 15 minutes. In real time, bidirectionally, without losing data. The first version crashed after 10,000 records. The second version handled the volume but corrupted fields when both systems wrote to the same record within the same second. The third version solved conflicts but broke each time that Salesforce added a custom field. I threw out all three and started over. That was 2022. I had a business degree, six months of self-taught programming, and a problem I could not stop thinking about: why is it so difficult to keep a CRM and a database synchronized in real time? Three years and one Y Combinator batch later, Stacksync syncs millions of records across 200+ enterprise systems with sub-second latency. I want to explain why this problem is as hard as it is, because most engineering teams underestimate it until they're six months into a failing project. 1. Polling Is a Lie You Tell Yoursel