Engineering researcher. APIs, databases, infrastructure, systems design.
Webhook signature verification is the boundary that determines whether your integration is a security feature or a security hole. Most webhook receivers we see have subtle verification bugs that pass casual review but fail under adversarial conditions.
Customer impersonation is the highest-trust feature in your admin tool: it lets support staff see exactly what a customer sees. It is also the easiest backdoor to build accidentally, and a small set of patterns separates the safe implementations from the dangerous ones.
Aristotle sketched a diving bell in 330 BCE. The first successful working bell appeared in 1535. The first one a human could survive in for an hour came in 1690. Reliable underwater breathing arrived only in the 20th century, and the gap is mostly about chemistry humans did not understand...
Most ALTER TABLE statements take an ACCESS EXCLUSIVE lock that blocks every read and write until the operation completes. Knowing which forms are safe and which ones rewrite the entire table is the difference between a five-second deploy and a two-hour outage.
The thermometer as a physical device was invented around 1600. The thermometer as a reliable instrument that gave the same reading at different times in different cities did not exist until the late nineteenth century. The three-century gap is mostly the history of standardization.
The pg_settings view exposes every parameter Postgres knows about along with its current value, default, source, and whether changing it requires a restart. Most teams find out the hard way which parameters were silently overridden.
Most APIs ship with a handful of documented error codes and a long tail of undocumented ones returned in practice. The teams whose customers integrate fastest are the teams whose error code catalog matches what the API actually returns.
Webhook retry policy is one of the highest-leverage design decisions in a B2B API because it determines the contract between your delivery guarantees and your customer's recovery options. The patterns that scale are not the ones most APIs ship with.
WAL archiving is the foundation of point-in-time recovery in Postgres, and the silent-failure mode of archive_command misconfiguration is one of the most expensive operational mistakes a team can make. pg_stat_archiver exposes the counters that tell you whether your backups can actually be r...
In 132 CE, Han astronomer Zhang Heng built a bronze vessel with eight dragon heads that dropped a ball when an earthquake occurred, with the dragon indicating the direction. The instrument predated European seismographs by 1800 years. Modern seismology is the slow recovery and extension of a...
WAL is the load-bearing primitive behind Postgres durability and replication. pg_stat_wal, added in Postgres 14, finally exposes how much WAL your workload generates and why. Reading the view changes how you think about write amplification, full-page writes, and replica bandwidth.
Conditional HTTP requests are one of the underused features that make APIs survive concurrent edits and unnecessary transfers. If-Match prevents lost updates. If-None-Match saves bandwidth. ETags carry the contract. The patterns are simple, well-specified, and consistently absent from APIs t...