Engineering researcher. APIs, databases, infrastructure, systems design.
The page size limits in your API are usually set once in an early ticket and then become permanent. The decisions matter more than they look because customers build their integrations around the constraints you ship with.
Logical decoding turns Postgres into a streaming source of row-level changes. Used well it eliminates a service. Used poorly it produces phantom slot-fill outages.
Search endpoints sit between database query and product feature. The decisions that make them survive contact with real customers are not the ones most API guides emphasize.
Parallel query is one of the more impressive Postgres features and one of the more frequently misunderstood. The configuration is straightforward; knowing when it earns its cost is harder.
Most APIs treat errors as a status code plus a sentence. The APIs customers love treat errors as a recovery surface that tells them exactly what to do next.
Common Table Expressions make complex SQL readable. They also have subtle performance implications, especially around the optimization fence and recursive evaluation, that the readability sometimes obscures.
Most APIs handle starting work well and finishing work well. The middle case (telling them to stop) is where the design tradeoffs get interesting, especially when the operation has already been partly committed.
Postgres pages are 8KB, but rows can be much larger. The Oversized-Attribute Storage Technique handles this transparently, with performance and operational implications most teams never inspect.
Standard cursor pagination assumes a linear ordered list. Tree, graph, and hierarchical resources break that assumption, and the patterns that handle them well are not obvious extensions of the flat-list case.
The read-modify-write pattern is one of the most common concurrency bugs in production code, and it almost never shows up under low load. Three correct patterns exist that prevent the bug, and each fits a different operational context.
Most APIs conflate quotas and rate limits, returning the same 429 status for both. The distinction matters because the right response from the customer is different in each case, and conflating them produces support tickets about charges that customers cannot diagnose without reading source cod
The crane is one of the oldest continuous engineering traditions, with Roman treadwheel cranes that lifted 6000 kilograms persisting essentially unchanged through medieval cathedral construction and only being substantively superseded in the late 19th century. The history reveals how stable an