Tag: #api

What 'Real-Time' Actually Means for a Vessel Tracking API

A practical tour of what "real-time" really means when you're tracking ships — the physics of AIS, the latency budget, and how to actually pull positions out of the VesselAPI.

Read more →

What a Port Event Actually Is (And Why Your Timestamps Are Lying to You)

A walk through what actually gets recorded when a ship enters a port, why the timestamps are weirder than you think, and how to query the data cleanly without getting burned.

Read more →

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...

Read more →