Engineering notes on APIs, data infrastructure, automation and the AI systems built on top of them.https://boringtech.dev/https://boringtech.dev/posts/nigeria-ai-needs-a-data-foundation/https://boringtech.dev/posts/nigeria-ai-needs-a-data-foundation/We should invest aggressively in AI. But not every problem is an AI problem, and AI can't make up for digital infrastructure we haven't built.Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTaidata-infrastructuregovtechnigeriahttps://boringtech.dev/posts/grading-the-firewall-not-the-site/https://boringtech.dev/posts/grading-the-firewall-not-the-site/Sites behind Vercel's bot protection got failing grades for headers they had set correctly. The fix: detect when you reached a wall instead of the site, and grade only what you actually saw.Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTsecuritydebuggingproducthttps://boringtech.dev/posts/webhook-handlers-that-survive/https://boringtech.dev/posts/webhook-handlers-that-survive/A webhook handler that works in a demo can lose money in production. Six rules for handling payment notifications, with code, and how to test each one without a tunnel.Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTwebhookspaymentstypescripttestinghttps://boringtech.dev/posts/tools-that-say-what-they-dont-know/https://boringtech.dev/posts/tools-that-say-what-they-dont-know/Lessons from building an MCP server over Nigerian news and data: an empty result is an answer, and a model will believe whatever your tool implies.Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTaimcpapi-designhttps://boringtech.dev/posts/a-green-checkmark-is-not-evidence/https://boringtech.dev/posts/a-green-checkmark-is-not-evidence/My scrapers reported 100% success for weeks while inserting nothing. Here is how I changed monitoring to check what a pipeline produced, not whether it exited cleanly.Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTmonitoringdata-pipelinesoperationshttps://boringtech.dev/posts/the-query-wasnt-slow/https://boringtech.dev/posts/the-query-wasnt-slow/Keyword search on 170,000 news articles took up to 36 seconds. EXPLAIN ANALYZE pointed at the wrong thing. The fix was a narrow table, and search now answers in 29 ms.Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTpostgresperformancedebugginghttps://boringtech.dev/posts/rebuilding-government-websites/https://boringtech.dev/posts/rebuilding-government-websites/A design system tested only on its own docs page is a guess. So I rebuilt ministry websites page for page on afrigov, logged every gap, and fixed the system instead of the pages.Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTdesign-systemsaccessibilitygovtechhttps://boringtech.dev/posts/llm-output-you-can-trust/https://boringtech.dev/posts/llm-output-you-can-trust/When a model's answer goes out under a real person's name, a wrong answer costs more than a blank one. How I made a model cite approved facts, and how code, not the model, decides what gets used.Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTaillmpythonstructured-outputshttps://boringtech.dev/posts/accessibility-that-fails-the-build/https://boringtech.dev/posts/accessibility-that-fails-the-build/National flag colours are often too light to read as text. afrigov checks every colour pair at build time, derives a readable shade when an official colour fails, and fails the build when anything still doesn't pass.Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTdesign-systemsaccessibilitycsshttps://boringtech.dev/posts/scaling-websentry-on-workers/https://boringtech.dev/posts/scaling-websentry-on-workers/How WebSentry uses a producer and consumer queue, R2 and an atomic claim to run scheduled scans reliably as the number of monitors grows.Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTcloudflare-workersscalingarchitecturehttps://boringtech.dev/posts/edge-caching-in-front-of-an-api/https://boringtech.dev/posts/edge-caching-in-front-of-an-api/A Cloudflare Worker cache in front of a FastAPI backend: TTLs per path, never caching per-user data, serving stale copies during outages, and why every bad TTL I set showed up as a user-facing bug.Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTcloudflare-workerscachingplatform