A comprehensive series documenting real-world lessons learned from building and maintaining API integrations. This journey covers the pitfalls, best practices, and hard-won wisdom from working with enterprise APIs, data management, and building robust systems.
Project Overview
Working with APIs is deceptively simple—until it isn’t. This series chronicles the real challenges I’ve faced when integrating with APIs, managing data, and building systems that need to be reliable, idempotent, and production-ready.
From duplicate data disasters to authentication nightmares, from rate limiting surprises to data consistency challenges, each post in this series tells the story of a specific problem and the solution that emerged from it.
The Complete Journey
1. The Day I Realized My Data Was Doubling: A Cautionary Tale About API Data Management
November 10, 2025
A cautionary tale about API data management. Learn how a simple oversight led to duplicate data, and discover the technical solutions for building idempotent data archiving systems with proper deduplication strategies.
Key Topics Covered
- Data Management: Preventing duplicates, ensuring idempotency, and maintaining data integrity
- Database Design: Constraints, upsert patterns, and data validation strategies
- API Integration Patterns: Best practices for consuming and archiving API data
- Error Handling: Building resilient systems that handle API failures gracefully
- Monitoring & Logging: Visibility into what your system is doing and when things go wrong
Lessons Learned
This series represents a practical guide to working with APIs in production environments. Each post covers specific challenges and the solutions that emerged from real-world experience.
The journey has taught me about:
- The importance of idempotency in data operations
- Why database constraints are your safety net
- How to design systems that can safely run multiple times
- The value of logging and monitoring
- Why testing with real data matters more than sample data
Series Impact
These lessons come from real production systems where mistakes have real consequences. By documenting these experiences, I hope to help other developers avoid the same pitfalls and build more robust API integrations from the start.
The patterns and solutions shared in this series are battle-tested and production-ready, providing a practical guide for anyone building systems that integrate with external APIs.