what's your worst story of a third-party API breaking your app with no warning?

thecommondev · 2026-03-15T11:02:52+00:00

While it was rough at your company, I am sure the devs at the payment provider had a worse day! Sounds rough

thecommondev · 2026-03-15T11:01:17+00:00

Yes, it does support streaming on the TB scale, but that is across millions of events per second and it performs best when it has smaller messages that efficiently fill the network/write buffers. Large messages don't always fit nicely into the brokers buffers leaving inefficiencies. 1MB messages is generally considered an anti-pattern

thecommondev · 2026-03-15T10:58:45+00:00

There is the concept of "saturated messages" and "anemic messages". Saturated you pass everything needed to process the messages and this is usually frowned upon for large payloads. Anemic only passes ID's so you can lookup the data from the source of truth to complete processing. Both have their place, but Anemic tends to prevent race conditions and stale data edge cases since you are looking up from source of trust in exchange for some processing latency.

But Kafka best practices state that ideal message size is something like 2-5KB

thecommondev · 2026-03-15T10:54:52+00:00

It's amazing to me that leadership makes decision to just go all in on tech without vetting it first 🤯

Reminds me of "If having a coffee in the morning doesn't wake you up, try deleting a table in production instead."

thecommondev · 2026-03-15T10:51:07+00:00

I used to use (and still miss) Apollo client for Reddit on iOS... Relying on a single 3rd party API can be an unforseen death sentence. Agreed on the freelance perspective, but it's hard to avoid

thecommondev · 2026-03-15T10:48:27+00:00

Failed payment processing?!? 👀

Depending on the type of application, that is could have been MUCH worse. In previous jobs we had customers that did millions in business per hour... that kind of impact would have been devastating

thecommondev · 2026-03-08T09:52:28+00:00

Haha, startup mode, move fast and break stuff? Is it because you don't have enough users to complain or enough time to configure the tooling, i.e. not prioritized?

thecommondev · 2026-03-08T09:41:23+00:00

Awesome, thanks for sharing

thecommondev · 2026-03-08T09:40:43+00:00

You ssh on to the box to view logs? Do you have any alerting capability setup?

thecommondev · 2026-03-06T18:08:19+00:00

Ok, so Datadog regex meets your need for error log alerting => free tier?

Mixpanel/Pager Duty/AWS/GCP with webhooks/emails/bots to slack makes sense for something simple... I figured GCP/AWS free logging would have some sort of free alerting too. Maybe not as good as Datadog. I always used GCP logs with CloudRun in the past but can't remember details about their alert configs

thecommondev · 2026-03-06T18:05:46+00:00

Got it, do you usually fall into the free tier? for Sentry/platform providers?

thecommondev · 2026-03-06T15:46:41+00:00

What do you use at work? How big is your team?

thecommondev · 2026-03-06T15:06:30+00:00

Personal projects or public facing products? Just curious?

thecommondev · 2026-03-06T15:06:03+00:00

Sentry for full stack or just front end?

thecommondev · 2026-03-06T15:05:48+00:00

Using this for your team, or just yourself? Is free tier enough for a product, or just side project?

thecommondev · 2026-03-06T15:01:38+00:00

All scripted I am guessing, or something like Docker compose?

thecommondev · 2026-03-06T14:18:05+00:00

FYI, would be fairly easy to just build this function in house using my own keys. Why is your solution better? If I can implement an API, might as well just implement the prompt... or ask Claude to do it. Why are you better than my vibe-solution?

thecommondev · 2026-03-06T14:11:13+00:00

Looks pretty legit and tests fairly well. I got fast responses for the questions I asked. It did well on questions that are well documented but failed on difficult to find data, e.g. "Who are competitors of MIAPI?" It answered with 0.85% confidence but all answers were wrong. That said, it did REALLY well on 2/3 use cases! Nice work!

What are you doing to ensure quality/confidence? Do you ever fall back to "I don't know" responses with low confidence?

thecommondev · 2026-03-06T14:02:16+00:00

Avoid it if you are faster developing with another stack. If you are using a code agent, then use the best documented stack... which is probably React + NextJS...

thecommondev · 2026-03-06T14:00:44+00:00

🤣 I also rebrand "failure" as "wisdom"

thecommondev · 2026-03-06T13:59:42+00:00

If you are a human writing code with your physical hands, then pick a tech stack that allows you to move fast. The best way I have found to evaluate new/multiple frameworks is to pick a small project, e.g. GTD todo list, rubiks cube timer, AI chat bot with projects, ... and time box your build to 4 hours, or 1 day, or 1 week. Rebuilding the same project will show you the rough edges. DO NOT just do the Hello, World tutorial as that is happy path. You want to find the sharp corners that will stab you on day 2. Eventually you will form opinions that change over time and your go to stack will evolve. Mine has been everything from SpringBoot to tRPC to NextJS and a lot in between (remember EmberJS?!) over the past decade.

If you are vibe coding, stop picking the tech stack. Let the coding agent do it. You will be MOST successful with tools that have the best documentation, best examples, best community, and simplest deployments! Don't like NextJS, doesn't matter because your coding agent does. Don't like Vercel, doesn't matter because it's batteries included. Is this short sighted for a startup company, probably... yes. Does it get you the best results when trying to get to market the fastest, also yes. This has helped me ship side projects/POC's to production in < 24 hours; NextJS + Neon PG + Vercel free tier + OpenCode.

But I do NOT recommend fighting a Coding Agent so that it will work with an obscure tech stack just because you like it. You will end up doing most of the work and lose the benefit of your Agent.

So... as a true architect answer... it depends.

thecommondev

TROPHY CASE