The case for keeping a public status page honest
A status page that always shows green, even during an outage, is not reassuring at all. It is evidence the page is decorative rather than operational.
Opinion on the location data business: pricing, lock-in, privacy, and what the big providers get wrong.
A status page that always shows green, even during an outage, is not reassuring at all. It is evidence the page is decorative rather than operational.
A webhook works well for one request at a time. It works badly for a script that just wants to send a thousand lookups and wait for a thousand answers.
A response with fifteen decimal places of latitude looks precise. It is not accurate just because it has more digits than the method can actually support.
An undocumented error code turns every failed request into a guessing game. Publishing the list is a small thing that saves real debugging time.
A dataset announced with pride and never revisited degrades quietly. Borders shift, postal systems change, and time zone rules get amended by governments that do not send a press release.
A thousand lookups sent one at a time and a thousand lookups sent as a batch are the same amount of work. The price should not depend on how they were packaged.
A free tier is not a discount, and it is not bait for a sales call. It is the smallest useful amount of a product a developer needs to find out if it fits.
Calling a lookup AI-powered is a marketing choice more often than a technical disclosure. The question that matters is whether the answer is right, not what produced it.
An exciting new API version is a migration project for everyone downstream of it. Boring, stable versioning is a feature, not a lack of ambition.
A browser SDK for a server-side lookup mostly just moves your API key somewhere a visitor's browser can see it. That is not a convenience worth having.
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