The Daily
A note a day on APIs and the realities of shipping web applications. Stuff I've actually learned across 25 years of doing the work.
Disaster Recovery for a One-Server Laravel App: The 2am Restore
Backups are useless if you've never practiced the restore. Here's what a real one-server Laravel recovery actually looks like at 2am.
Your backup strategy is not a strategy until you've done the restore. I don't mean read through the steps — I mean actually spun up a blank box, followed your runbook, and watched the app come back. Most shops haven't. I know because I was one of them, until a managed hosting client's VPS provider had a catastrophic…
Read the daily →Trigger.dev: Background Jobs That Actually Live in Your Codebase
I've run Sidekiq for years. Trigger.dev is the first JS job runner that made me think I could stop missing it.
I've been running Sidekiq in Ruby projects and Laravel Horizon in PHP projects long enough that I stopped thinking about background jobs as a hard problem. You define a job class, enqueue it, Horizon or Sidekiq runs it, you watch a dashboard. Done. The JS/Node world has never had a clean answer to this. BullMQ is fine…
Read the daily →OpenAI Function Calling: Don't Let Your Schema Drift
Function calling is the most useful thing OpenAI added to the API — and the easiest way to ship a system that silently breaks three weeks later.
Function calling is the most useful thing OpenAI added to the API since the API itself. It's also the fastest way I've found to build something that works great in staging, ships to production, and then silently starts returning garbage two weeks later when someone changes a function signature without updating the…
Read the daily →pgvector: Embedding Search Inside Postgres, No Extra DB Required
I was skeptical about skipping a dedicated vector DB. After shipping pgvector on two real projects, I'm convinced it's the right call for most teams.
The pitch for a dedicated vector database sounds reasonable until you realize you already have a perfectly good database sitting there. pgvector is a Postgres extension that adds a column type and similarity search operators, and it's good enough that I've stopped reaching for Pinecone or Weaviate by default. I want…
Read the daily →Typesense: Real Search for 1/10th What Algolia Charges
I swapped Algolia for Typesense on a product catalog and cut the search bill by 90%. Here's what it took and what I'd warn you about.
Algolia is genuinely good software. I've also watched it quietly eat $800/month from a mid-size e-commerce client who sold outdoor gear and had maybe 400k product records. The search was fast. The bill was faster. When Typesense crossed my radar I was skeptical — "open source Algolia" is a bold claim — but I ran the…
Read the daily →