Ideas, Experiments, and Lessons Learned
I decided to build a real API over a weekend. Not a tutorial. Not a toy project. Something I’d actually use in production later. Here’s what happened. The Goal I needed an API for a small internal tool at work. Nothing fancy — just a way to fetch, create, and update customer records. I told…
I decided to build a real API over a weekend. Not a tutorial. Not a toy project. Something I’d actually use in production later. Here’s what happened. The Goal I needed an API for a small internal tool at work. Nothing fancy — just a way to fetch, create, and update customer records. I told…
I used to Dockerize everything. Every project, every service, every side hustle — straight into a Dockerfile. It felt right. “Works on my machine” solved, reproducible environments, production parity. What could go wrong? Turns out, a lot. At least for local development. The Docker Desktop Tax Docker Desktop is hungry. On my MacBook, it easily…
It was 2 AM when my phone buzzed. Not a notification — an alert. The kind you dread. Our main API was down. Users couldn’t log in. Payments were failing. And I was the only developer awake. The First 10 Minutes My heart rate spiked. I SSH’d into the server, ran some commands, saw nothing…
Our API was slow. Not painfully slow, but slow enough that customers complained. Response times hovered around 800ms for simple list endpoints. After some digging, I realized the database queries were the culprit. The Problem We Ignored Like most startups, we moved fast and shipped features. We added indexes here and there when things felt…
Our API was slow. Not painfully slow, but slow enough that customers complained. Response times hovered around 800ms for simple list endpoints. After some digging, I realized the database queries were the culprit. The Problem We Ignored Like most startups, we moved fast and shipped features. We added indexes here and there when things felt…
I spent three years convinced that microservices were the answer to everything. Every new project, every side project, every internal tool — I’d break it down into services. API gateway here, auth service there, notification service over there. Then I burned out. Not from the architecture itself, but from the overhead. Let me tell you…
I know what you’re thinking. “Navid, you’re insane.” And maybe you’re right. But here’s the thing — I was curious. How far can these AI coding tools actually go when you stop holding their hand? So I did something stupid. I gave an AI assistant full access to our staging environment with write permissions to…
I’ve built a lot of APIs over the years. Some were good. Most had problems I didn’t notice until users started complaining or my future self had to maintain them. Here’s what I’ve learned the hard way about API design — mistakes that cost me hours of debugging and refactoring. 1. Inconsistent Naming Conventions This…
I’ve built a lot of APIs over the years. Some were good. Most had problems I didn’t notice until users started complaining or my future self had to maintain them. Here’s what I’ve learned the hard way about API design — mistakes that cost me hours of debugging and refactoring. 1. Inconsistent Naming Conventions This…