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.
Lambda Cold Starts: When the Latency Math Says No
Cold starts behind API Gateway look fine on paper until a real client hits a sleeping function and waits three seconds for a login page. Here's where I draw the line.
Cold starts are the thing AWS hoped you wouldn't think too hard about. For high-traffic endpoints, they're a rounding error. For the low-traffic internal tools and healthcare portals I build, they can be the entire user experience. I spent a chunk of last year migrating a client's internal ops tool off a small EC2…
Read the daily →The $50/mo SaaS Trap: When Buying Costs More Than Building
That $50/mo tool looks cheap until you factor in the integration tax, the vendor lock-in, and the afternoon I spent migrating a client off one.
The pitch is always the same: why build it when you can pay $50 a month for something that already exists? Nine times out of ten, that's genuinely good advice. The tenth time, you end up three months later with a client paying $600 a year for a tool that does 70% of what they need, locked into an API that changed…
Read the daily →PHP-FPM Slow Log vs. MariaDB Slow Query Log: You Need Both
Two slow logs, two completely different blind spots. Here's what each one actually catches and why running only one gives you a false sense of confidence.
Most developers know about the MariaDB slow query log. Fewer bother with PHP-FPM's slow log. And almost nobody I've talked to understands that the two instruments measure completely different things — which means relying on only one leaves you half-blind when production starts dragging. I've been burned by this more…
Read the daily →MariaDB Table Partitioning: When It Helps and When It Doesn't
I partitioned a 200M-row audit table expecting a miracle. I got a lesson. Here's what actually works and what just shuffles the pain around.
I've been burned by table partitioning twice in the last five years — once it saved a client's reporting pipeline, and once it made things measurably worse. The difference wasn't the feature, it was whether I actually understood the query patterns before I reached for the hammer. If you're staring at a or table that's…
Read the daily →SendGrid's Click Tracking Rewrites Your URLs — Here's Why That Bites You
SendGrid's click tracking silently rewrites every link in your emails through their redirect domain. That's a DMARC problem and a user trust problem you need to know about.
I've been sending transactional email through SendGrid for years across probably a dozen client projects. It works well enough that I mostly set it up and move on. But click tracking has a quiet behavior that has caused real headaches — once for a healthcare client whose IT security team flagged it, and again when I…
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