API

Go 07 Sep 2026 7 min read

Reject Unknown JSON Fields in Go API Requests

Go makes it pleasantly simple to decode JSON into a struct. That convenience also hides a compatibility decision that matters at API boundaries: by default, fields that do not map to the destination struct are ignored. For internal data this can be useful. For an HTTP request, it can turn a typo into a silent behavior change. A client may send "expires_inn": 3600 while the server expects "expires_in". The JSON is valid, decoding can succeed, and the server may continue with a zero value or a default. The caller receives no direct signal that the field it thought it supplied was never used.

Golang JSON

Web Development 01 Sep 2026 7 min read

Keyset Pagination in SQL for Fast, Stable APIs

Pagination looks simple until a table becomes large or new rows are inserted while a client is paging through results. LIMIT and OFFSET are easy to understand, but deep offsets can become expensive and changing data can make rows appear twice or disappear between requests. Keyset pagination, also called seek pagination, avoids those problems by asking for rows after a known position instead of asking the database to skip a number of rows.

SQL Databases

Web Development 01 Sep 2026 8 min read

Idempotency Keys for Safe API Retries

Retries are essential in distributed systems. Networks fail, clients time out, load balancers reset connections, and responses sometimes disappear after a server has already committed a write. The dangerous case is a retry of a non-idempotent operation. If a client sends POST /orders, times out, and sends the same request again, the server may create two orders even though the user intended one. An idempotency key gives the client a stable identifier for one logical operation. The server remembers the result associated with that key and can return the same result when the request is retried.

Backend API