VesselAPI

We were running bcrypt on every API request. Cost: 946ms of auth overhead before we did anything useful. Replaced it with HMAC-SHA256 + an in-memory cache. Auth overhead is now under 10ms. Zero DB queries on the hot path. The writeup: vesselapi.com/blog/optimizin…

Every ship in the world broadcasts its position every few seconds. At @vessel_api , they process 700,000 of those reports per hour. They ran it on MongoDB for a year. Then they stopped. The data looked like documents. You could serialize a position report as JSON. MongoDB stored it fine. But vessel positions are measurements. Timestamp and location aren't just metadata. They answer questions like: Where was this ship two hours ago? What's within 50km of Rotterdam right now? Show me everything through the English Channel since Tuesday? At 700K rows per hour, fighting the grain of your database gets expensive fast. The @TimescaleDB migration gave them hypertables with 1-hour chunks, automatic compression segmented by vessel identifier, and retention policies that just drop aged-out partitions in milliseconds instead of a cron job that once failed silently for a week. But the really clever engineering is the spatial query layer: a three-stage filter using H3 hexagonal indexing, PostGIS, and chunk pruning that takes 16.5 million candidate rows down to hundreds. And then there's the bug. A single mismatched struct tag, a leftover bson serialization name from the MongoDB era colliding with the new JSON field name, silently broke the entire port data pipeline. 156,000 port events created with no geographic identifier. The fix was changing one string. The deeper fix was finding 240 more vestigial bson tags scattered across the codebase, each one a potential repeat. All of it runs on a single EC2 r7i.large. 2 vCPUs, 16 GB RAM. Worth the read whether you're considering a migration or not: vesselapi.com/blog/mongodb-t…

We migrated our maritime AIS platform from MongoDB to TimescaleDB — hypertables with 1-hour chunks, H3 hexagonal spatial indexing, and PostGIS on a single r7i.large. Also found 240 dead BSON struct tags that silently broke our port pipeline. Full writeup: vesselapi.com/blog/mongodb-t…

A VLCC just got fixed at $770,000/day. The Clarksea Index hit an all-time record. Ships are running the Strait of Hormuz with their transponders off. We wrote about what the numbers look like when a chokepoint goes silent. vesselapi.com/blog/hormuz-sh…

We process ~1M AIS messages per hour. About 40% never reach our database. One highlight: a 300-meter oil tanker reporting coordinates in central Madrid. Here's how we built a 250-line Go pipeline to filter phantom ships from real ones 👇 vesselapi.com/blog/why-there…

We pointed an LLM at live maritime databases and asked for an intelligence briefing on Rotterdam. 7 API endpoints, parallel execution, real vessel data — emissions, inspections, traffic — from a single prompt. Full walkthrough: vesselapi.com/blog/mcp-marit…