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 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…
Read the daily →Row-Level Security Is the Audit Log Feature You're Not Using
PostgreSQL's RLS can enforce HIPAA audit requirements at the database layer — where they can't be bypassed by a bug in your app code.
The thing that keeps me up at night on healthcare projects isn't a breach — it's an audit that reveals someone quietly read records they had no business reading, and my application logs are silent about it. Row-level security in PostgreSQL solves a chunk of that problem in a way that application-layer code simply…
Read the daily →ImageKit Is the Cloudinary Alternative I Should Have Found Sooner
After years of quietly absorbing Cloudinary's bills for image-heavy clients, I switched. Here's what I found.
Cloudinary is great. It's also expensive in a way that sneaks up on you. I had a real estate client whose Cloudinary bill crossed $400/month because of listing photo volume, and when I sat down to actually audit what we were using, I realized we were paying enterprise prices for a feature set we were only…
Read the daily →Postgres JSON Columns: When They're a Lifesaver and When They're a Trap
I've shipped both approaches in production. Here's when JSON columns save you and when they quietly wreck you.
I've reached for Postgres JSON columns at least a dozen times in the last five years and been grateful for it maybe half of those times. The other half I was cursing myself six months later when the "flexible" column had become an unmapped wasteland of inconsistent keys and missing data. The choice isn't complicated…
Read the daily →