Our Story​

My co-founder and I are building the full-stack toolkit ZenStack on top of Prisma. One major feature is allowing define access policies declaratively in the schema. It started with Him reporting an issue for that:

If you are a developer familiar with RESTful APIs, you might have heard of OpenAPI. It is a specification for describing RESTful APIs in a format readable for humans and machines. Building a public-facing OpenAPI includes three tasks:

1. Authoring an OpenAPI specification which serves as the contract between the API provider and the API consumer.
2. Implementing the API endpoints based on the specification.
3. Optionally, implementing client SDKs for consuming the API.

In this post, you'll see how to accomplish all these tasks and build a database-centric OpenAPI service, secure and documented, within 15 minutes.

Why multi-tenant is trending​

Collaboration has become crucial in the contemporary business landscape. This is due to the mounting complexity of the challenges we face, as well as the prevalence of remote work. Businesses are realizing that effective collaboration is the key to success, as it promotes teamwork, enhances productivity, and leads to better outcomes.

Although still experimental, Client Extensions are one of the most exciting features introduced in recent Prisma releases. Why? Because it opens a door for developers to inject custom behaviors into PrismaClient with great flexibility. This post shows a few interesting scenarios enabled by this feature, together with thoughts about where we should set the boundary to avoid overusing its power.

This article outlines the concept of code legacy and its underlying reasons, drawing on a real-life example of the usage of pnpm.

If you are starting your first Open Source Project with no resources and connections, this post aims to provide some helpful tips on how to attract users based on our personal experience.

What changed for full-stack​

The concept of full-stack development has been around for many years, but its popularity has surged dramatically since 2022. As a consequence, its meaning has also changed.

One big piece of conventional wisdom for software operation is "never expose internal-facing services to the public", and databases (especially SQL databases) fall into that category. It's good advice because data stored in them are usually highly sensitive and indispensable to most systems' proper running. Investigations with honeypots showed that publicly open databases are discovered within hours after they become active and start getting attacked within a day. What's scarier than this is you often don't even know you ever had a data breach.

Soft delete is a common requirement for SaaS products. But the current solution in Prisma has certain issues. Let's see how ZenStack solves it.

I initially tried GitHub Copilot, just briefly, around the beginning of 2022. It raised my attention partly due to its name - I hold a private pilot license and have always been an aviation enthusiast. At that time, I found the idea intriguing, but the product usability was not so satisfactory: both in terms of speed and quality of generation. I started to reuse it about three months ago, and now it has become indispensable to me and worth every penny of that $10/mon that I pay.

What makes me a happy customer? Let's figure it out.