Engineering
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
Engineering
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
Engineering
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
Engineering
Every payment processor, every Git hosting platform, every notification service sends webhooks. And most developers who receive those webhooks do the same thing: parse the JSON body, check the event t
Engineering
The hardest problem in API design is not building the first version. It is changing it without breaking everyone who built on it. Every successful API eventually needs to evolve: new features, better
Engineering
There's a myth in software engineering that code speaks for itself. It doesn't. Code speaks to compilers. Humans need words. The best engineers I've worked with were, without exception, clear writer
Engineering
GitHub Actions is reliable. Until it is not. A workflow that ran perfectly for six months suddenly fails silently — a dependency changed, a secret expired, a runner ran out of disk space. If your only
Engineering
After building four API-first products — DocuMint, CronPing, FlagBit, and WebhookVault — we have encountered every API design mistake in the book. Some of them we made ourselves. Here are seven that s
Engineering
Somewhere around 2016, the software industry decided that monoliths were the enemy. If your application ran as a single deployable unit, you were doing it wrong. The future was microservices: dozens o
Engineering
Every time someone ships a side project, the same debate erupts: "Why didn't you use PostgreSQL?" As if choosing SQLite for a product with zero users is some kind of engineering malpractice. Here's t
Engineering
Rate limiting is one of those features that seems simple until you try to build it well. The basic idea — restrict how many requests a client can make — is straightforward. The details are where it ge
Engineering
Every few months, a new framework promises to change everything. A new database claims to solve problems you didn't know you had. A new deployment paradigm emerges that makes the old way look primitiv