API

One neat use case for the HTTP ETag header is client-side HTTP caching for GET requests. Along with the ETag header, the caching workflow requires you to fiddle with other conditional HTTP headers like If-Match or If-None-Match. However, their interaction can feel a bit confusing at times. Every time I need to tackle this, I end up spending some time browsing through the relevant MDN docs123 to jog my memory. At this point, I’ve done it enough times to justify spending the time to write this....

Recently, I purchased a domain for this blog and migrated the content from rednafi.github.io1 to rednafi.com2. This turned out to be a much bigger hassle than I originally thought it’d be, mostly because, despite setting redirection for almost all the URLs from the previous domain to the new one and submitting the new sitemap.xml3 to the Search Console, Google kept indexing the older domain. To make things worse, the search engine selected the previous domain as canonical, and no amount of manual requests were changing the status in the last 30 days....

While working with GitHub webhooks, I discovered a common pattern1 a webhook receiver can adopt to verify that the incoming webhooks are indeed arriving from GitHub; not from some miscreant trying to carry out a man-in-the-middle attack. After some amount of digging, I found that it’s quite a common practice that many other webhook services employ as well. Also, check out how Sentry does it here2. Moreover, GitHub’s documentation demonstrates the pattern in Ruby....

At my workplace, we have a large Django monolith that powers the main website and works as the primary REST API server at the same time. We use Django Rest Framework (DRF) to build and serve the API endpoints. This means, whenever there’s an error, based on the incoming request header—we’ve to return different formats of error responses to the website and API users. The default DRF configuration returns a JSON response when the system experiences an HTTP 400 (bad request) error....

Updated on 2023-09-11: Fix broken URLs. Recently, I was working with MapBox’s1 Route optimization API2. Basically, it tries to solve the traveling salesman problem3 where you provide the API with coordinates of multiple places and it returns a duration-optimized route between those locations. This is a perfect usecase where Redis4 caching can come handy. Redis is a fast and lightweight in-memory database with additional persistence options; making it a perfect candidate for the task at hand....