About

I'm @brandur, an occasional writer, and engineer at Stripe and previously Heroku.

I most often talk about web APIs, Postgres, Rust, software safety and resilience, efficient human interfaces, and running.

Articles

Minimally Invasive (and More Accurate) Analytics: GoAccess and Athena/SQL
A privacy and GDPR-friendly approach to producing basic and complex site analytics, and one which is more accurate in an age when adblockers reign supreme. February 16, 2021
Feature Casualties of Large Databases
Databases shed important RDMS features as they get big. Examining why this tends to be the case, and some ideas for preventing it. December 1, 2020
Doubling the Sorting Speed of Postgres Network Types with Abbreviated Keys
Making the sorting speed of network types in Postgres twice as fast by designing SortSupport abbreviated keys compatible with their existing sort semantics. August 7, 2019

Older articles available here.

The Heroku HTTP API Design Guide, revisited
A few reflections on the Heroku HTTP API Design Guide, and a link to a fork that brings it back to its original format. June 5, 2021

Older fragments available here.