Net API Notes for 2019/02/25
It has been a strange fall and winter season in the DC metro area: nothing but rain, rain, and more rain. But I can't let the seasonally odd weather dampen my mood. There's API notes to get to!
NOTES
OPTIMIZING FOR THE SPEED OF LIGHT
Darrel Miller not only has written a well-grounded, powerful piece. He also has hit close to home with his post entitled "Optimizing for the Speed of Light".
In my day-to-day work, there's been a noticeable uptick in the number of teams wishing to deploy ever more exotic messaging schemes. When we dig into the use cases, the rationale usually boils down to one of speed. It's true, there may be some theoretical speed benefits to be had. However, as Darrel points out, often these approaches come before the team has exhausted common sense, practical approaches already at their disposal.
Highly, highly recommend this one.
OPEN SOURCE IN THE ERA OF CLOUD APIS
Stephen O'Grady brings us something a bit different. Writing on the Redmonk blog, he questions what open source looks like in the era of cloud APIs. Specifically, how does open source change when we're no longer keen to deploy things in our data centers, but hope those cloud providers have a premade bundle available?
Stephen makes compelling arguments that:
- "APIs are increasingly of greater importance than the code that instantiates them."
- "complicated machinations over source code and licensing may miss the point and be protecting the wrong asset"
- "calling the Google vs Oracle a copyright case of the decade understates its importance"
For previous coverage of the Google vs Oracle case over API copying, see previous Net API Notes: specifically, Oracle winning after the original ruling was in Google's favor.
A TAXONOMY OF MICROSERVICES
Stefan Tilkov has shared his slide deck called "Microservices, A Taxonomy. More than yet another trip down microservice cheerleading, Stefan does a great job of illustrating the pros and cons of various architectural patterns.
More exciting is the range of antipatterns that make an appearance. There is something to be said for being at a place in an approach's maturity where there are known ways things predictably go sideways.
MILESTONES
- There's a new Google Docs REST API for task automation. Coolio.
- There's a minor tweak to the upcoming HTTP Deprecation Header. I'm strangely excited about this one. Being able to gracefully (and programmatically) phase out old code is an important part of complete API management!
- Assertible, a QA tool for testing web services, has added the ability to sync generated tests with Swagger and OpenAPI descriptions. It drives me crazy that they refer to these documents as "specifications". A specification is not the same as an API description written to a specification. Words matter, and the fact that a tooling vendor perpetuates the misuse is a bummer. They should know better.
WRAPPING UP
Like data? Interested in storytelling IT transformation at the enterprise level? I'm hiring a Principle Data Analyst to join the team at my day job. There is an "evergreen" job description available. However, if you'd like to have specifics, send me an email. I'm glad to chat.
If you're looking for an in-personal API event, check out Webapi.events. And if you have something to add, just let me know.
As always, thanks to my Patreon sponsors. Their support of this newsletter, WebAPI.events, and more is greatly appreciated.
Till next time, Matthew