Category: Engineering

The slowest requests on our API were the ones that found nothing

On two TimescaleDB hypertables a lookup that found a row took 28 ms and one that found nothing took seconds. What caused it, what we changed over four days, and what is left.

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The 946-Millisecond Tax: Migrating API Key Auth from Bcrypt to HMAC-SHA256

How we replaced bcrypt API key verification with HMAC-SHA256 and an in-memory cache, cutting authentication overhead from 946ms to under 10ms, eliminating database queries on the hot path, and survivi...

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Hexagons, Hypertables, and 240 Dead Tags: Migrating a Maritime Data Platform to TimescaleDB

How we migrated a maritime AIS platform from MongoDB to TimescaleDB, built two-layer spatial indexing with H3 and PostGIS, and found 240 dead struct tags from the old world.

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