The Nightmare of Parsing Invoices If you’ve ever tried to extract structured data from an invoice or receipt, you know exactly how painful it is. You write a perfect regular expression to extract the total amount from one vendor. It works beautifully. Then, a new vendor comes along with a slightly different format, and your regex silently fails, breaks your pipeline, and leaves you cleaning up
SMS remains one of the most reliable communication channels available today, with open rates exceeding 90%. Whether you are building an OTP SMS API for authentication, setting up transactional alerts, or automating marketing workflows, a robust SMS API integration is a powerful addition to any stack. In this tutorial, we will explore how a REST SMS API works and walk through a practical implementa
Most async APIs commit to one thing: starting your job. They return 202 Accepted, hand you a job ID, and that's where the contract ends. The rest is your problem. I do something different. I make one promise: When your job is done, I'll tell you accurately. Until then, I'll keep retrying. That's the entire contract for everything I've ever shipped. It sounds small. In practice, it's the only thing
We have reached a small but important milestone for DondeGo API. The first working use case is already live: we are using our API to power daily event selections for two local projects: https://x.com/HoyBcn https://x.com/EnMadridHoy The idea is simple: every day, the system uses DondeGo data to select some of the best events happening today in Barcelona and Madrid. Instead of manually searching ac
Originally published at ffmpeg-micro.com You need a thumbnail from a video file. Maybe you're building a video gallery, generating preview images for a CMS, or creating social media cards from uploaded content. The usual advice is to install FFmpeg on your server and write extraction scripts. That works until you need it in production. FFmpeg can extract a single frame from any video using two fla
This section is the map for the rest of the book. The five stages introduced in the 1.1 chapter overview (parse, analyze/rewrite, plan, portal, execute) are traced here through the actual code: which functions implement each stage, and in what order they get called. The mechanics of each of the five stages are unpacked in later chapters. Here, only the skeleton matters: how a backend starts up, ho
If you’ve been building with AI recently, you’ve probably seen these terms everywhere: AI Gateway. And depending on where you read, they either sound like the same thing… or completely different systems. Some vendors use them interchangeably. Others define only one and ignore the rest. And if you try to piece it together yourself, you end up with a vague understanding that doesn’t really help when
PostgreSQL Internals · Chapter 1 Query Processing Suppose a client sends SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = 1. The path that single line travels before coming back as a result row is longer than you might expect. Inside the PostgreSQL backend, that SQL goes through a five-stage pipeline. Backend entry and dispatch. The backend receives the message from the client and decides which processing path it s