Posts

Lies We Tell Ourselves About Email Addresses

Bear with me, because some of these "lies" are going to feel obvious, or like unimportant trivia. In all honesty, that's not that far from the truth. However, I hope you'll let me try to build a detailed and fun illustration showing how something as mundane as email can break our expectations in surprising ways.

We'll cover a lot of edge cases, stumble over some small blocks, and even discover a few technically-correct things that are valid, but not commonly supported even in big systems like Gmail (probably for good reason, to be fair).

I decided to make a worse UUID for the pettiest of reasons.

Yesterday, I was messing with an API project I've been tinkering on for a long time. The kind of project that one keeps rewriting over and over again through the years to maintain that post-refactor dopamine high. You know what I mean. Anyway, totally out of the blue, I realized something. Something needed to be refactored. You see, I use UUID pretty heavily and that meant my resource URLs were, like, really long and ugly.

Request Mirroring and Shadow Testing with Caddy

https://github.com/dotvezz/caddy-mirror

I've been using Caddy for a long time, both professionally and for self-hosted hobby stuff (like this website!). It's a workhorse project that does a lot more than what's advertised on the website (but the "ultimate server" claim on the site might roll some eyes).

With easy automatic HTTPS, reverse-proxy features, basic load-balancing, and caching functionality, Caddy is seen at or near the edge at a lot of websites. When you consider the flexible routing, JWT validation module and at least two different zero-downtime ways to deploy configuration changes, all of a sudden it starts looking like a quick and lightweight API Gateway too.