Thoughts, tutorials, and tales from the digital frontier. Lessons learned and wisdom shared.
Your design took a week. Your customer list took three years, one signup at a time. Only one of those can be rebuilt, and it isn't the one people worry about.
Read moreDesign your API well and you can grow it for years without breaking anyone. But every long-lived API eventually hits the change it can't make politely. Versioning is how you break a promise to people you can't even see, without leaving them face-down. And the goal is to use it as rarely as you can.
Read moreThere's a line item with the word "hosting" on it, and most owners couldn't say what it buys or whether they can reach it. Here it is in plain terms, including the one part that's actually worth your attention.
Read more"Expose a deliberate facade, not your raw table" is good advice right up until someone asks how. The how is a mapping layer: one place that turns your internal objects into your API objects. It's unglamorous plumbing, and it's the difference between an API that speaks one language and a pile of endpoints each speaking its own.
Read moreThe restaurant was the intuition. This is the same picture with the real names on it, and a simple diagram, so that when your developer says "the frontend" or "the API," you know exactly which part of the restaurant they mean.
Read moreStanding up an MCP server feels like a weekend project. Except you've also shipped a privileged, internet-adjacent service into an ecosystem racking up critical CVEs faster than almost anything in recent memory. The threat model, and how not to become a statistic.
Read moreThe moment something depends on your API, you've made a promise, and you usually can't see who you made it to. Which is why the worst thing you can do is expose your raw table. Here's the design lesson, and the argument that taught it to me.
Read moreYou've paid for one, or you're about to, and everyone keeps saying "the backend," "the database," "the API," while you nod along. Here's the whole thing in one picture, and you already understand it, because you've eaten at a restaurant.
Read moreMost apps don't need to be native, and building them native anyway means standing up a whole second discipline your team doesn't have. Here's the case for reaching for the stack your web developers already know, and the honest line for when not to.
Read moreYour site is down, your email is dark, and you've just learned the domain lapsed. First: breathe. A lapsed domain is usually recoverable, and how you get it back depends entirely on which stage it's in. Here's how to tell, and what to do at each one.
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