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ExternalSoftware Engineering
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Implementing UUID v7 by hand: time-sortable primary keys (and the same-millisecond trap)

Random UUID v4 makes a poor primary key: values land all over the index, so B-tree inserts scatter across pages and page splits go up. UUID v7 puts a millisecond timestamp in the leading bits (standardized in RFC 9562), so generation order equals sort order and you get locality back. I needed a UUID generator that runs entirely in the browser, and while building it I implemented v7 by hand instead of pulling in a library. Here is the layout, the implementation, the trap I hit, and when each vers

javascriptdatabaseprogramming
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ExternalSoftware Engineering
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Expiring Content: Put the Deadline in the Data, Not the Prose

Introduction I run several sites that publish time-limited information: Kindle manga sales, grocery and household deals. Everything on them expires. That creates a structural weakness. Expired deals left on the page erode trust in the whole site. A reader clicks a link labeled "through July 31" and lands on a full-price page. After that happens a couple of times, they stop coming back. Removing expired entries by hand does not scale; the more articles you have, the worse it gets. So I moved th

javascriptwebdevnode
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ExternalSoftware Engineering
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Enforcing Content Tone With a Lint That Fails the Build

Introduction I run about twenty static sites on an automated pipeline. Article data lives in JSON, and a dependency-free build.js emits the HTML. Since updates run unattended, most of the writing is done by machines too. That created a problem I did not anticipate: tone drifted. I had a rule that these sites use no emoji. Yet every run slipped one in somewhere. A heading here, an FAQ answer there. I would remove them, and the next day they showed up somewhere else. Trying to hold a style rule

javascripttestingwebdev
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ExternalSoftware Engineering
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citesure 0.5.17: soft-check ORCID iDs before you ship

Bibliographies increasingly carry ORCID iDs. LLM drafts also invent them. citesure 0.5.17 treats ORCID like other soft identifiers: validate the shape, resolve the public record, and warn when the listed author is clearly wrong. Offline ISO 7064 mod 11-2 checksum (citesure lint-orcids) Online public API person resolve + author-name soft-match (citesure orcid) Disk-cached person records; MCP tool citesure_orcid for agents Domain pack orcid-authors Examples pip install https://git

researchpythonorcid
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ExternalSoftware Engineering
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Understanding Next.js Page Caching (with a real example)

Caching can be a tricky topic, especially when pages don’t update the way you expect. /writing page of my site. Whenever I added or updated articles, the changes did not show immediately. Oddly enough, the individual article pages updated as expected, but the listing page stayed stale. After some digging, I realized this was not a bug. It was Next.js doing exactly what it is supposed to. Next.js (App Router) handles HTML caching at the edge in production. For statically prerendered pages, it set

notecachingfrontend
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ExternalSoftware Engineering
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Software Is Cheap. Proof Is Not.

AI has made a working demo radically cheaper. That is useful. It is also dangerous, because a plausible interface can now create the feeling of progress long before there is evidence of a product. At App Foundry, we treat generation as the easy part. The hard part is deciding what deserves to exist, turning evidence into a coherent product contract, and proving the live journey as a stranger would experience it. A prototype can prove that familiar patterns fit together. It does not prove that pe

aiwebdevtesting
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ExternalSoftware Engineering
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Why Your Unit Tests Aren't Enough (And How to Break Your Own API)

Stop testing the happy path. Learn how to use property-based testing and Schemathesis to automate chaos and break your API before your users do We’ve all been there. You finish building a new API endpoint, fire off a perfectly formatted JSON payload, and get a beautiful 200 OK. You write a few unit tests covering the expected inputs, watch the green checkmarks light up in your CI pipeline, and confidently merge the pull request. Then the code hits a live environment. A frontend glitch sends a ma

webdevsecurityapi
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The Backfill Pattern: Adding Required Columns Without Downtime

Adding a required column to a table sounds like the simplest task in the world. Then you try it on a table that's already in production, with code writing to it every second, and you find out why it isn't. There are two ways people usually try this, and both break. Add the column as NOT NULL right away, and the migration fails outright, or it locks the table while it scans millions of existing rows that have no value to give it. Add it as nullable instead and move on, and nothing enforces the co

backenddatabasesql
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