Engineering researcher. APIs, databases, infrastructure, systems design.
Indexes bloat. They corrupt rarely. They become suboptimal when their definition changes. The classic REINDEX takes an ACCESS EXCLUSIVE lock that production cannot tolerate. REINDEX CONCURRENTLY is the answer most teams do not know about.
Most status pages are green almost always and green during outages. The reasons are operational and political, not technical. Here is what a trustworthy status page actually looks like and how to build one.
pg_dump is what most teams reach for and what most teams should not rely on alone. The honest backup strategy combines logical dumps for portability with physical base backups plus WAL archiving for point-in-time recovery.
Rate limit documentation is one of the most consistently underdone surfaces in B2B API design. Customers do not need a treatise; they need three numbers and an example. Most APIs deliver neither.
BRIN indexes are the rare Postgres feature that can replace a 10GB B-tree with a 1MB index on the same column, with almost no maintenance cost. They are also wrong for most tables. Knowing which case you have is the entire skill.
Customers ask for webhook replay and webhook resend as if they were the same feature. They are not. Building both with the same primitive produces confusing semantics. Building them with the right distinct primitives is two days of work that saves months of support tickets.
Postgres has three join algorithms. The planner usually picks the right one. When it picks wrong, knowing the mechanics is the difference between a query that runs in 50ms and one that runs in 5 minutes.
Cursor pagination is the right default for API list endpoints. But cursors break in subtle ways when the underlying data changes between page fetches. The patterns that handle deletions and updates correctly are worth knowing before you ship.
The roller chain looks simple. It is also the product of two centuries of mechanical refinement, and its invention enabled the safety bicycle, motorcycles, motorcycles, conveyor systems, and ultimately the entire industrial supply of small-scale power transmission.
VACUUM FULL is the textbook way to reclaim disk space in Postgres. It also takes an ACCESS EXCLUSIVE lock for the duration of the rewrite, which makes it unusable in production. pg_repack is the workaround everyone eventually finds.
Webhook subscriptions almost always need filtering. The patterns that work are a small flat namespace of event types, optional resource filters per subscription, and explicit handling of new event types as they get added.
Most teams use a single Postgres superuser for everything and discover the cost when they need to audit access, rotate credentials, or grant a contractor read-only access. A small amount of role design pays for itself the first time.