Three people edit one Figma button at once. Who wins?

transcript

Three people edit the same button. At the same moment. Every screen must end up identical. So who wins?

Priya moves it. x becomes 112. Arjun recolours it. Coral. Meera moves it too. x becomes 140.

Text editors transform every edit against every other one. Figma called that unnecessarily complex for its problem. Because design edits are mostly one thing. Set this property. So a file is a map of objects. Each object, a map of properties.

Arjun changed fill. Nobody else did. No conflict at all. So the button turns coral, on every screen. Priya and Meera both changed x. That's the real conflict. Last writer wins. Meera's 140 reached the server last.

But here's the catch. Last by whose clock? No timestamps. Last means last to reach the file's server. Its sequence number is the only clock. So clock skew can't reorder anything.

Nothing is averaged. And owning the file decides nothing. The result is always a value someone actually chose.

Different properties never conflict. Same property? The last to reach the server wins.

Full breakdown in the lecture.