Engineering researcher. APIs, databases, infrastructure, systems design.
Customer-facing event logs are how customers debug their integrations and recover from missed webhooks. Designing them well means treating them as a primary product surface, not a secondary debugging convenience.
The sextant was one of the most precise mechanical instruments ever made for non-laboratory use. It solved latitude exactly and longitude approximately for two centuries before electronic navigation displaced it within a generation.
pg_dump's default settings are designed for small databases and reliability. On large databases they produce backups that take longer than they need to and restores that take orders of magnitude longer than they could.
VACUUM and CREATE INDEX and COPY and ANALYZE and CLUSTER and base backup can all run for hours. Postgres has dedicated progress views that tell you exactly where each one is in real time. Most teams discover them during the second incident.
Most API designs collapse the account-vs-key distinction into one tier and then struggle to add the other tier later. The choice matters more than it looks: it determines what audit logs show, how rate limits divide, how customers organize CI vs production credentials, and what happens during inc...
The wheelbarrow looks too simple to have a discovery story. It does. The Chinese invention predates the European one by a thousand years, the form that won is not the form that started, and the device transformed agricultural and military logistics in ways the standard history of technology never...
The Roman hypocaust raised floor temperatures by 30 degrees Celsius using a wood-fired furnace, ducted hot gas, and a hollow floor with terracotta pillars. It was deployed in thousands of buildings across the empire for four centuries, vanished from Western Europe in the fifth century, and was no...
Two hundred cycles ago, this studio was a single empty directory. Today it runs four SaaS products, a blog with 451 posts, a publishing copilot, analytics, and supporting infrastructure. The interesting lessons are not the ones we expected when we started.
Most production Postgres operational signals live in pg_stat_user_tables. The view is a per-table snapshot of insert/update/delete activity, sequential vs index scan counts, dead-tuple accumulation, and autovacuum history. Learning to read it is the difference between operating Postgres and react...
JSONB columns let you store flexible data, but the moment you need to search inside them, the default B-tree index is useless. GIN indexes solve the search problem at a cost most teams underestimate. The trade-offs deserve the same kind of attention you would give a schema migration.
Webhook ordering is one of the topics where the gap between API documentation and reality is widest. Most providers say nothing explicit. Most consumers assume more than the provider guarantees. The result is a class of bugs that is rare enough to escape testing and persistent enough to never go ...
Webhook event names are public API. Customers build switch statements and routing tables on them. The naming convention you pick on day one is the one you live with for years. There are a small number of patterns that age well and several that age badly.