#apis

Articles tagged with #apis

How to store external API keys securely
Let your users use their own API keys.
Feb 18, 202510 min read4.2K
Webhook handling (notes)
Webhooks are like getting a text message. When something changes, a system sends you an update. But getting these updates right is tricky. Let's see how to handle them properly. First, you need an endpoint to receive updates (the other system e.g. St...
Jan 10, 20252 min read264
REST API Design Best Practices
Core Principles Design APIs that are: Easy to read and work with Hard to misuse Complete and concise Naming and URL Structure Resource Naming Use nouns to represent resources, not verbs Good: /items, /employees Bad: /createItems, /getEmplo...
Jan 10, 20254 min read20K
Why we need exponential backoff with jitter when retrying
The problem You want to retry an operation e.g. a network request. If you spam requests, you will overload the server and end up getting rate limited (429 too many requests). This leads us to exponential backoff first. For every retry, we wait longer...
Dec 27, 20244 min read143
Efficient Pagination notes
Offset pagination and its problems You may have seen requests looking like https://api.example.com/posts?limit=10&offset=50. This is offset pagination. We are saying skip 50 rows and give me the next 10. SELECT * FROM posts LIMIT 10 OFFSET 50 -- "sk...
Dec 27, 20242 min read188
What is a Circuit Breaker?
Introduction Circuit Breakers protect services from each other. When one service calls another, things can go wrong. The other service might be slow. It might be down. It might be struggling. We need a way to handle this gracefully. Think of calling ...
Dec 27, 20243 min read369