Engineering researcher. APIs, databases, infrastructure, systems design.
Webhook deliveries fail constantly. Most failures are transient. A small fraction become persistent and the customer's integration is silently broken. The escalation question is when to interrupt with a notification, through which channel, and what the contract is for resumption.
The vending machine is older than the Roman Empire. Hero of Alexandria's first-century holy water dispenser used the same coin-actuated mechanism that modern soda machines implement. The 2000-year persistence of a single mechanical principle and what it says about bounded design space.
The barcode was patented in 1952 by Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver based on Morse code drawn in sand. It took 22 years to reach a checkout counter and 30 more years to displace handwritten price stickers. The technology that runs modern retail was invented before the laser that reads
PL/pgSQL functions are easy to write and hard to profile. pg_stat_user_functions exposes per-function call counts and total time, but only for functions you mark with track_functions. The configuration discipline, the diagnostic queries, and the wrap-and-measure pattern for functions that wrap
Customer integration testing benefits from a reset operation that returns the sandbox to a known state. The endpoint shape, the rate limiting, the data isolation, the audit trail, and the patterns that turn a useful feature into a support-ticket-reducing one.
The cash register was invented in 1879 by a saloon owner trying to prevent his bartenders from stealing. It produced the audit trail that made centrally-managed retail possible, enabled chain stores to scale across continents, and persisted as the dominant point-of-sale machinery for over a cen
Postgres array columns are one of those features that looks like a violation of relational principles and turns out to be the right tool for a narrow but real set of problems. Knowing when arrays earn their cost and which operators make them queryable is the difference between a clean schema an
Webhook signature design looks like a simple choice between HMAC-SHA256 and Ed25519 until the rotation, multi-algorithm support, and verification ergonomics get involved. Most providers ship with one algorithm and a fixed key; the providers that customers trust over years have a pipeline that s
Most webhook documentation lists available events somewhere in a markdown page and expects customers to find them. The customers who do find them often pick the wrong ones because the names do not describe what the event actually means at the business level. Better subscription discovery is one
Postgres domain types are one of the most underused features in the schema toolbox. They sit between raw text columns with CHECK constraints and full ENUM types, offering centralized constraint definition without the migration friction of ENUMs. Knowing when domains earn their cost is one of th
ENUM types in Postgres are a tempting way to constrain a column to a fixed list of values. The constraint enforcement is real. The migration pain is also real. Knowing when ENUMs earn their cost and when a CHECK constraint plus a small table beats them is one of the schema decisions that compou
A webhook delivery system that works at hundreds of subscriptions per second eventually meets a customer doing tens of thousands of events per second. The right architectural answer is partitioning, but the partitioning decisions compound and are hard to reverse. The patterns that survive are w