How API Pagination Patterns Sabotage Data Integrity

Episode 57 of The Developer Tools Podcast with Fexingo digs into a hidden source of bugs in modern APIs: pagination. Lucas and Luna break down why naive offset and page-number pagination causes duplicate or missing records when data changes between requests, and how cursor-based pagination solves the problem. They walk through a real example — a SaaS analytics dashboard that showed different totals every time a user paged through report data — and explain why time-based cursors, stable sort keys, and ordered UUIDs matter for consistency at scale. The episode also covers practical trade-offs: when cursor pagination feels like overkill, how to handle cursor expiration, and why many well-known APIs still use offset pagination despite its flaws. If you design or build APIs, this 10-minute conversation will change how you think about paging through data. #API #Pagination #DataIntegrity #CursorBasedPagination #OffsetPagination #BackendEngineering #SoftwareArchitecture #API Design #DeveloperTools #SaaS #Database #Consistency #UUID #SortKeys #TechDebt #Business #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo