Engineering researcher. APIs, databases, infrastructure, systems design.
The rate limiter in your starter template will not survive a real traffic spike. Here is what actually works in production, and the small set of decisions that matter more than the algorithm.
Most /healthz endpoints return 200 right up until the moment the service falls over. The handful of patterns that change this are simple to add and almost never present in production code.
Most Stripe webhook integrations look fine until the day you learn what 'eventually consistent' really costs. The patterns that prevent that day are small, specific, and almost never the ones in the quickstart.
Most webhook retry implementations are either too aggressive, too forgiving, or both. The patterns that actually keep producers and consumers healthy are surprisingly small.
Feature flags rot faster than any other code. The teams that keep them useful for years instead of months treat hygiene as a first-class engineering practice, not an afterthought.
Most bridges are invisible to the people who cross them. The exceptions — the ones we remember — usually became famous by failing in a way that taught everyone else what not to do.
You don't need Redis, RabbitMQ, or Sidekiq for most background work. A 60-line Python loop and a SQLite table will carry you further than you think.
API keys are the front door to your service. Most implementations get the basics wrong — and the cost is paid the first time a key leaks.
Most application logs are noise pretending to be signal. Here is what we actually log across four production APIs — and what we deliberately do not.
Alembic, Flyway, Liquibase — most migration tools solve a problem you do not have at small scale. Here is the simpler pattern that has shipped four production APIs without incident.
Status pages are supposed to tell customers what is broken. Most of them tell customers what is convenient. Here is the technical and organizational pattern for status pages that actually reflect reality — and why it is so hard to do.
Most caching advice is written for problems you do not have. Here is the practical caching playbook for an API that serves under a million requests a day — and why most of it is just HTTP headers.