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
The Idea After deciding to build an iOS app using AI, the first thing I set out to create was a metronome app designed for dark stage environments. Back in college, I played drums — and while that was a while ago, there weren’t many metronome apps that felt both clean and professional. (Turns out, that’s still true today.) That’s what led me to the idea: a simple, black-and-white metronome where
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
Picking a screenshot API feels binary until you start integrating, then the edges show: one service has a Python SDK but no async queue, another has webhooks but charges extra for authenticated pages, a third makes you wire up an S3 bucket yourself. This post walks through how Rendershot and Urlbox compare across the dimensions that actually hurt to change later. Upfront: I build Rendershot, so tr
I have a confession: I'm a productivity app addict. Notion, Todoist, Things, TickTick, Bear, Obsidian — I've tried them all. And every single one failed me in the same way. Not because they were bad apps. But because they let me add unlimited tasks. So I'd wake up Monday morning, open my to-do app, and see 47 items staring back at me. By 9am I was already paralyzed. Decision fatigue is real. When