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.
SendGrid Domain Auth: What Actually Gets You to the Inbox
SendGrid's domain authentication isn't just a checkbox — get it wrong and your transactional email quietly rots in spam. Here's what I've learned the hard way.
The first time a client called me to say their password reset emails weren't arriving, I assumed it was a SendGrid outage. It wasn't. The emails were sending fine — they were just landing in Gmail's spam folder for every single recipient. The domain authentication was half-done, SPF was misconfigured, and nobody had…
Read the daily →Plaid Account Verification: Instant Auth vs. Micro-Deposits
I've shipped both Plaid flows for real clients. Here's the honest breakdown of when instant auth bites you and when micro-deposits are actually worth the wait.
Plaid's marketing makes instant auth sound like a no-brainer. Connect your bank in seconds, no waiting, done. And for maybe 60–70% of your users it actually works like that. The other 30% will hit a wall, and if you didn't plan for it, your fallback experience is going to be ugly. I've integrated Plaid's account…
Read the daily →OpenAI Embeddings: Cosine Similarity Isn't Enough for Production
Cosine similarity looks great in demos. In production search it'll quietly return garbage and you won't know why until a client calls.
Cosine similarity is the first thing every embedding tutorial teaches you, and it works beautifully in the notebook demo. Then you ship it to a real user with a real corpus and you start getting complaints: results that are semantically "close" but completely wrong for the actual query. I've been burned by this twice…
Read the daily →Meilisearch: Site Search in 200 Lines That Beats ES for Most Apps
I spent years reaching for Elasticsearch out of habit. Meilisearch does 90% of what I actually need at a fraction of the operational cost.
I kept reaching for Elasticsearch the way a surgeon reaches for a scalpel — out of habit, not necessity. Then a client needed product search on a mid-sized e-commerce catalog, I stood up Meilisearch on a $12 VPS instead, and it was running in an afternoon. That was two years ago. I've used it on four projects since…
Read the daily →Lemon Squeezy: What Actually Changes When Someone Else Handles VAT
Lemon Squeezy positions itself as the merchant of record so you don't deal with VAT. Here's what that actually means in practice — and what it costs you.
I spent a week integrating Lemon Squeezy for a small SaaS product last year and came away with a clear opinion: it's a genuinely good fit for a specific situation, and a bad fit for everything else. The merchant-of-record model sounds like magic until you understand what you're actually trading away. What "Merchant of…
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