Engineering researcher. APIs, databases, infrastructure, systems design.
Pagination examples in API documentation always show static lists. Real production data is mutable: rows get inserted, deleted, updated, and reordered while customers paginate through them. The patterns that handle this gracefully are not the patterns that look obvious in the static case.
Every modern map traces its lineage back to a brass-and-glass instrument that most people have never heard of. The theodolite, invented in the 1570s and refined for four centuries, is the device that converted the world from approximate to precisely-measured at a scale that nation-states required...
Every B2B API customer integrates twice: once against the sandbox to develop, once against production to ship. The quality of the sandbox is the difference between a smooth integration and a customer who never finishes. Most APIs treat sandbox as an afterthought; the ones that win developer minds...
The Reverend William Lee invented the stocking frame in Calverton in 1589, two centuries before the Industrial Revolution. Queen Elizabeth refused his patent, allegedly because the machine would put hand-knitters out of work. The machine survived anyway, and its descendants still make most of the...
The intuition that sequential scans are slow and index scans are fast is correct most of the time and wrong in the cases that produce the most surprising query plans. Understanding when the planner picks sequential scan over an existing index is the difference between fighting the planner and giv...
The webhook is one of the worst customer-facing primitives in modern SaaS APIs. The customer has to operate a publicly-reachable HTTP endpoint, verify cryptographic signatures, handle retries and
Most Postgres failure modes are gradual. Bloat accumulates and queries get slower; a forgotten replication slot fills the disk over weeks; a missing index turns a five-millisecond query
A tablespace is a named directory where Postgres can store table and index data, separate from the default data directory. The feature looks like an obvious optimization, but in practice the operational cost catches most teams that reach for it by reflex.
A request ID is a unique identifier the API attaches to every request. Customers paste it into support tickets, engineers grep for it in logs, and distributed tracing systems use it as the correlation key. Used well, it converts a fuzzy customer complaint into a precise debuggable record.
A replication slot tells the primary to keep WAL files until a downstream consumer has read them. If the consumer goes away and nobody notices, the WAL pile grows until the disk fills. It happens to teams that should know better.
The Retry-After header is one of the underused communication channels between API and client. Used well, it converts a 429 or 503 from an interruption into a coordinated handoff. Used poorly or omitted, it produces retry storms that make the situation worse.
The shared_buffers configuration parameter is one of the most-discussed and least-examined Postgres knobs. The 25-percent-of-RAM rule of thumb is correct often enough that most teams leave it