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 failover.” That sounds reassuring. But when real failure hits… many systems still go down — hard. Why? Because failover is easy to configure — but extremely hard to make reliable at global scale. Here are the most common ways failover fails in production: RDS Multi-AZ enabled Kubernetes failover configured Looks good on paper. Reality: Takes minutes instead of seconds Gets stuc
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
SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE & REFACTORING 3 Domain-Centric Architectures Every Software Architect Should Know The first concern of the architect is to make sure that the house is usable; it is not to ensure that the house is made of brick. — Uncle Bob The expression domain is occurring in software bibles for a very long time now and is heavily discussed in the book Domain-Driven
How we moved from a fragile loop-based payout system to a reliable, idempotent, and traceable architecture. On paper, payouts sound simple: Customer places an order Platform collects payment Platform pays the seller That's it. Until you try to do it at scale. In any marketplace or fintech system, money flows across multiple parties: Sellers / vendors Delivery partners Platform fees Discounts, vouc
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