engineering
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.
engineering
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.
engineering
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.
history
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.
engineering
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.
engineering
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.
engineering
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.
engineering
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.
engineering
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.
engineering
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.
engineering
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.
engineering
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.