Blog · Topic
Architecture
Writing from Sawhorse Engineering on architecture.
- Articles
- 18
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- Topic
- 26 September 2026Household permissions for pet booking portalsSeparate booking, payment, pet information and pickup permissions instead of assuming everyone linked to a household has the same authority.
- 26 September 2026Pet service packages with an explainable session balanceTrack prepaid entitlements through bookings, attendance, cancellations and corrections without treating one editable balance as the entire record.
- 26 September 2026Boarding capacity is more than a count of kennelsRepresent suitable spaces, overlapping stays, household sharing and review requirements before confirming a boarding reservation.
- 26 September 2026Offline job notes without losing office changesDesign a technician workflow that preserves field observations during a connection loss while keeping assignment and approval decisions authoritative.
- 26 September 2026Van stock and return visits need one parts workflowConnect part requests, reservations, van transfers and job consumption so a return visit is scheduled against more than an expected delivery date.
- 26 September 2026A dispatch board that understands the job, not just the calendarModel skills, travel, parts and job state before letting a dispatch board assign technicians. A free rectangle is not proof that a visit is feasible.
- 21 September 2026Retrieval over your own documents: what decides qualityMost retrieval systems fail on chunking, metadata and permissions rather than on the model. What to get right before choosing anything else.
- 17 September 2026Payment orchestration: when it is worth it and when it is notRouting payments across several processors solves real problems at scale and creates real complexity below it. How to tell which side you are on.
- 16 September 2026Guardrails for AI agents that take real actionsAn agent with tools can change your data. The controls that matter are enforced in code, not requested in a prompt.
- 15 September 2026Idempotency: the idea that prevents duplicate everythingA lost response can turn a reasonable retry into a duplicate order, email or charge. Idempotency helps, but its boundary must include the actual effect.
- 12 September 2026Private and on device models: when they make senseRunning a model inside your own environment removes a data transfer and adds real cost. What actually forces the decision, and what it changes.
- 10 September 2026When to use an orchestrator and when to write codeA workflow tool and a service solve the same problems differently. Four criteria that settle which one a specific process needs.
- 9 September 2026Deciding which system owns which fieldA sync cannot resolve conflicting business rules on its own. Decide who can write each field before connecting the systems.
- 8 September 2026Dead letter queues, and why silence is the worst failureA failed integration needs a visible recovery path. Retry budgets, failed work queues and reconciliation prevent errors from disappearing into logs.
- 7 September 2026Integrating with a system that has no APIExports, database replicas and file exchange are all workable. Screen scraping usually is not, and here is how to tell the difference.
- 5 September 2026Webhooks done properlyReceiving webhooks is easy. Receiving them so that duplicates, replays, out of order delivery and outages do not corrupt your data takes six specific things.
- 3 September 2026Building an API other people will useAn internal API that becomes a partner API exposes every undocumented assumption. What to settle before the first external caller.
- 29 August 2026Why the database should refuse invalid dataApplication validation holds only for the paths someone remembered. A constraint holds for every path, including the import script written at midnight.
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