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.
JSONB Everywhere Is a Smell
JSONB is one of Postgres's best features. It's also one of the easiest to abuse. Here's where I draw the line.
JSONB saved me on a project once, then nearly wrecked a different one. The difference wasn't the feature — it was whether I was using it to solve a real modeling problem or just to avoid making a decision. I see this pattern constantly in codebases I inherit: a column of type on half the tables, a blob on the other…
Read the daily →Why I Went Back to REST After Two Years on GraphQL
I bought into GraphQL hard. After two years and several production apps, I switched back to REST. Here's the honest post-mortem.
I was a GraphQL believer. I gave the conference talk in my head, I migrated a production codebase to it, I evangelized it to clients. Two years later I ripped it out of two projects and went back to REST. This is not a hot take — it's a post-mortem. What GraphQL Promised Me The pitch is genuinely compelling. One…
Read the daily →When PgBouncer Becomes the Bottleneck Instead of the Fix
PgBouncer saved my Postgres clusters for years — until it quietly became the thing killing them. Here's what I missed.
PgBouncer fixed my Postgres connection problems for years without me really understanding why it worked. Then I hit a situation where it stopped working, and I had to actually understand it. That's what this post is about. The Problem PgBouncer Actually Solves Postgres is not Node. It doesn't handle thousands of…
Read the daily →Better Stack: The Uptime + Logs + Status Page Trio I Keep Reaching For
Better Stack quietly bundles three tools I used to stitch together from three vendors. It's not perfect, but it's close enough that I've migrated most of my managed hosting clients to it.
Better Stack: The Uptime + Logs + Status Page Trio I Keep Reaching For I spent years paying three separate vendors to do three things that logically belong together: uptime monitoring, log aggregation, and a public status page. Better Stack bundles all three, the API is clean, and the pricing doesn't make me want to…
Read the daily →Cloudinary's Great — Until It Isn't
Cloudinary solves real image optimization pain. But I've watched the bill quietly double on two client accounts, and that changes the calculus.
Cloudinary's Great — Until It Isn't Cloudinary does what it promises. You hand it an image URL, append a transformation string, and you get back a properly sized, format-converted, CDN-cached file in milliseconds. That's genuinely useful. What's less useful is opening an invoice and realizing you're paying $249/month…
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