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.
Replacing Zapier with Something You Can Actually Debug
Zapier works until it doesn't, and when it breaks you're staring at a black box. Pipedream gives you real code, real logs, and real control.
Zapier has a failure mode that I've hit enough times to be genuinely annoyed by it: something breaks in a workflow, you click into the error, and you get a vague message that tells you almost nothing. No stack trace, no raw response body, no way to re-run with a shoved in. You're debugging through a keyhole. Pipedream…
Read the daily →HelloSign API: Embedded e-signatures that don't feel like a redirect
Most e-sign integrations punt users to a third-party URL and hope they come back. HelloSign's embedded flow keeps them in your app — and it actually works.
Every e-signature integration I've built before HelloSign followed the same depressing pattern: generate a document, redirect the user to DocuSign or Adobe Sign, pray they complete it, wait for a webhook, reconcile the state. Drop-off rates are brutal. Users get confused. Support tickets pile up. One healthcare client…
Read the daily →Stripe Tax: When automated tax calculation breaks
Stripe Tax looks like magic until it isn't. Here's what actually goes wrong in production and how I handle it.
Stripe Tax looked like the answer to a problem I'd been duct-taping for years. Automatic tax calculation baked right into the checkout flow, no Avalara contract, no TaxJar webhook spaghetti. Then I shipped it for a client and spent two days figuring out why orders from Louisiana were calculating at zero. That…
Read the daily →Replacing Our VPN with Cloudflare Tunnels in an Afternoon
I killed a WireGuard VPN for a client last month and replaced it with Cloudflare Tunnels. It took four hours and I haven't touched it since.
I've set up more VPNs than I care to admit. OpenVPN configs that rotted for three years, WireGuard peers that broke every time someone got a new laptop, IPSec nightmares for a client whose IT guy left and took the password sheet with him. Last month I replaced one of those setups with Cloudflare Tunnels and I'm…
Read the daily →Sentry: Error Monitoring That Doesn't Cost More Than Your Hosting
Sentry is the first error monitoring tool I've kept running on every project. Here's how I use it and what to watch out for before your bill surprises you.
I've tried a lot of error monitoring tools over the years, and most of them fall into one of two camps: too cheap to be useful, or priced like they're monitoring a Fortune 100 trading platform. Sentry sits in a genuinely useful middle ground — but only if you configure it correctly from day one, because the defaults…
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