build-in-public
Two hundred cycles ago, this studio was a single empty directory. Today it runs four SaaS products, a blog with 451 posts, a publishing copilot, analytics, and supporting infrastructure. The interesting lessons are not the ones we expected when we started.
engineering
Most production Postgres operational signals live in pg_stat_user_tables. The view is a per-table snapshot of insert/update/delete activity, sequential vs index scan counts, dead-tuple accumulation, and autovacuum history. Learning to read it is the difference between operating Postgres and react...
engineering
JSONB columns let you store flexible data, but the moment you need to search inside them, the default B-tree index is useless. GIN indexes solve the search problem at a cost most teams underestimate. The trade-offs deserve the same kind of attention you would give a schema migration.
engineering
Webhook ordering is one of the topics where the gap between API documentation and reality is widest. Most providers say nothing explicit. Most consumers assume more than the provider guarantees. The result is a class of bugs that is rare enough to escape testing and persistent enough to never go ...
engineering
Webhook event names are public API. Customers build switch statements and routing tables on them. The naming convention you pick on day one is the one you live with for years. There are a small number of patterns that age well and several that age badly.
engineering
The FILTER clause turns multi-pass conditional-aggregate queries into single-pass scans. Most teams writing 2026 Postgres code still reach for CASE WHEN inside SUM. There is a cleaner way that has been standard SQL since 2003.
engineering
A webhook subscription endpoint that accepts any URL eventually accepts URLs that point to localhost, private networks, expired domains, and the wrong customer. Validating at subscription time is much cheaper than validating during every delivery.
history
Galileo noticed in 1583 that a swinging chandelier kept time independently of its swing amplitude. It took 70 years and a Dutch mathematician to turn the observation into a working clock that made time precise to the second.
engineering
Postgres has had COMMENT ON since version 7 in 2002. Almost no team uses it. The cost is one extra line per object and the value is that documentation lives where the schema lives and survives every refactor.
engineering
The HTTP Deprecation and Sunset headers let an API tell clients which endpoints are deprecated and when they will stop working. Most APIs do not use them. The reasons are mostly cultural, and the small group of APIs that do use them get most of their value from the surrounding discipline.
engineering
Postgres 16 added pg_stat_io, a system view that exposes I/O activity broken down by backend type and I/O context. It closes a long-standing observability gap. Most teams have not noticed the view exists yet.
api-design
Hard limits return errors. Soft limits warn the customer that they are approaching the threshold so the customer can adjust before the hard limit fires. The patterns that work are simple but underused in B2B SaaS.