Page Numbers Lie: Offset vs Cursor Pagination

From Interview Notes To Production Reality While I was preparing for interviews, I came across a high-level system design for a News Feed — specifically from the frontend perspective. That's where I first encountered the terms offset-based and cursor-based pagination. I read about them. Briefly. You know how interview prep goes — there's always more ground to cover than time allows, so you skim what you can, bookmark the rest, and silently promise yourself you'll come back to it. Spoiler: you don't. 😅 Fast forward to recently — a requirement came up at work to implement infinite scroll with virtualization. And just like that, pagination was back on my desk, except this time it wasn't optional reading. It was a production decision. So I finally sat down, went deep, and now here we are. This post is everything that clicked for me. We'll cover: Why offset-based pagination is "dumb" in a specific, technical way What cursor-based pagination actually does differently How Relay formalised cur