APIs

gRPC vs REST: when I actually reach for each (and when gRPC is a mistake)

gRPC vs REST gets argued in the abstract. I've shipped both — a Rails↔Go deploy engine on gRPC, browser uploads on plain WebSockets. Here's my actual rule for choosing, and the cases where gRPC is the wrong call.

Syncing invoices to QuickBooks when the other side keeps changing under you

Third-party accounting APIs don't fail cleanly. Customers get deleted in QuickBooks behind your back, tokens expire mid-request, and retries duplicate records. Here's how one Rails integration stayed idempotent and learned to heal itself.

Wiring up an open-banking feed in Rails without leaking or getting locked in

Bank aggregators are slow, asynchronous, and full of PII you must never log. Here's how I integrated one: a swappable provider, encrypted credentials, a recursively-redacting request logger, and a poll-until-done connection job.