Also available in Spanish If you've ever stored a URL in a database and later regretted it, this is for you. It's a familiar scenario: a service needs to keep a reference to a resource that lives in another service. The obvious solution is to store the URL. It works — until the host changes, the API gets a new version, or the team decides to restructure the paths. Suddenly all the stored references are broken, and tracking down the impact becomes a bigger problem than it should be. The root issue is that a URL mixes two different things: what the resource is and where it lives. When you store a URL, you're betting that location won't change. In systems that evolve, that's usually a losing bet. The idea What if instead of storing where the resource lives, you store your own identifier that a gateway knows how to resolve?…