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.
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…
Read the daily →Migrating Off Auth0: When the Bill Outgrows the Value
Auth0 is genuinely great — until your MAU count hits a tier and the invoice makes you do a double-take. Here's how I think about the migration decision.
Auth0 is one of those services I've recommended without hesitation for years — right up until the moment a client forwarded me an invoice and asked me to explain it. The math on Auth0's pricing is fine at small scale and brutal at medium scale. And "medium scale" starts earlier than most people expect. What Auth0…
Read the daily →Postmark: Mixing Transactional and Marketing Email Will Hurt You
I learned the hard way that sending newsletters and password resets from the same stream is a deliverability disaster. Here's what Postmark taught me.
A client's password reset emails were landing in spam. Not occasionally — consistently. We dug in and found the culprit immediately: their marketing newsletter and their transactional emails were going out through the same Postmark message stream. The newsletter had a 12% spam complaint rate that month. It poisoned…
Read the daily →