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.
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…
Read the daily →AWS S3 Pre-signed URLs: Getting Upload Security Right
Pre-signed S3 URLs look simple until you realize you've handed users a blank check. Here's how I actually lock them down.
AWS S3 Pre-signed URLs: Getting Upload Security Right Pre-signed S3 URLs feel like magic the first time you use them. Your server mints a URL, hands it to the browser, the browser uploads directly to S3 — no file ever touches your application server. Then you discover what you didn't configure, and that magic turns…
Read the daily →Svix: Webhook Delivery as a Service — Worth the Line Item?
I added Svix to a client project last year and haven't rolled my own webhook queue since. Here's when it earns its keep and when it doesn't.
Svix: Webhook Delivery as a Service — Worth the Line Item? I've rolled my own webhook delivery system at least four times over the years. Every single time I thought I had it handled, something broke in production at 2am — a dead queue, a receiver that returned 200 but silently dropped the payload, a missing signature…
Read the daily →Stripe Connect: Don't lose sellers in the KYC maze
Stripe Connect's hosted onboarding sounds turnkey until you actually implement it. Here's what I've learned shipping it for real marketplaces.
Stripe Connect: Don't lose sellers in the KYC maze Stripe Connect's hosted onboarding is genuinely good — until it isn't. The part Stripe doesn't put on the landing page is that KYC friction will kill your seller conversion rate if you don't architect the flow carefully. I've shipped this for a few marketplace clients…
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