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

Soft Deletion Probably Isn't Worth It
The traditional soft deletion pattern using deleted_at columns leaks into code, curbs the usefulness of foreign keys, and makes data removal difficult. Luckily, there’s an alternative. July 19, 2022
Postgres: Boundless `text` and Back Again
The text type in Postgres, why it’s awesome, and why you might want to use varchar anyway. Also, a story about trying to get string parameters bounded at Stripe. September 10, 2021
How We Went All In on sqlc/pgx for Postgres + Go
Touring the ORM and Postgres landscape in Go, and why sqlc is today’s top pick. September 8, 2021

Older articles available here.

READMEs are a great idea, still
An ode to well-written READMEs. Detailed, but not overly so, and scannable with examples. August 7, 2022

Older fragments available here.