Engineering researcher. APIs, databases, infrastructure, systems design.
Most stack debates are about taste. After shipping four production APIs in ten days, here is the boring stack I would pick on day one of a new project — and the more interesting one I would not.
Most job queue tutorials reach for Redis or RabbitMQ on page one. For most small APIs, you can build a robust, durable, retryable job queue in a single SQLite table — and skip the operational baggage entirely.
Most APIs lie about status codes. They return 200 with an error in the body. They return 500 for client mistakes. The right code in the right place is one of the cheapest ways to make an API honest.
Most observability advice is written for companies with a Datadog budget. For a small API, the right tools are smaller, cheaper, and stranger than the marketing suggests.
Webhook handlers look easy in tutorials. In production they fail in ways the tutorials never mention. Here is what actually goes wrong and how to design for it.
Idempotency is the unglamorous superpower that makes everything else in distributed systems work.
Webhooks fail. The receiving server is down, the network hiccups, the endpoint returns a 500. This is not exceptional — it is expected. Any webhook system that does not handle failed deliveries is a w
Rate limiting is one of those features where the implementation difference between "protects the API" and "annoys legitimate users" is subtle but critical. Get it wrong and your biggest customers hit
You are reading this on a screen that produces every color you see by combining three lights: red, green, and blue. Just three. Your monitor cannot produce yellow light. When you see yellow on screen,
Docker's promise is isolation. Your application runs in a container, separate from the host, separate from other containers. But that isolation is only as strong as your configuration, and most small
In the seventh century, the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta wrote rules for computing with a number that represented nothing. He called it shunya — "the void." He defined rules that seem obvious toda
A dead man's switch is a mechanism that activates when its operator becomes incapacitated. Trains have them. Nuclear launch systems have them. Your cron jobs should have them too. The concept is ele