Net API Notes for 2019/05/02
May is here and, for me, it is a short week as I attend to some personal business. There are things worth mentioning, however, before the avalanche of May conference presentations. So, without further ado, here are this week's notes!
NOTES
USE-CASE VS DATA DRIVEN GRAPHQL APIS
Those that follow me on Twitter might recall my recent frustration in how GraphQL is being characterized by a small, but vocal, minority. Just exposing a data model to the world remains the fast track to consumer disappointment, be it REST or GraphQL API.
Github's Marc-André Giroux would agree. In his piece, "The Tension Between Data and Use Case Driven GraphQL APIs", he illustrates the importance of a designed experience. More importantly, he outlines a handful of approaches to minimize the challenge that this represents.
A REFRESHER ON CACHE CONTROL HEADERS
There's a lot in this article by Stefan Judis, "HTTP Headers for the Responsible Developer". And while the introduction talks in great detail about healthy website behavior, I loved the section of practical caching headers a bit further in. Not nearly enough APIs take advantage of HTTP's built-in caching directives. The fastest API call is the one that doesn't need to happen. If you are concerned about scale, but you aren't taking advantages of HTTP's natural helpers, why?
DISTRIBUTED MONOLITH "SMELLS"
This piece is from last year. However, since it was new to me, it might also be new to you. In "Distributed Monolith vs Microservices", Chris McCarthy outlines several straightforward indicators that a microservice effort might have missed the mark.
Microservices can be an advantageous architectural pattern for several reasons. Simplicity is not one of them. Being able to tell when an initiative is going off the rails is important for technical leadership.
MILESTONES
- Matt Bishop released the first public draft of Level 3 REST, a "collection of resource profiles and hypermedia patterns". The name "level 3" comes from the highest level of the Leonard Richardson's Maturity Model.
WRAPPING UP
I'm getting a bit more sophisticated in how I approach updated to NetAPI.events. Wait - what is NetAPI.events? Only a long overdue realignment with this newsletter, of course! While I was tinkering with the WebAPI.events code, it made sense to do a quick tweak of the branding. However, if you've got either link bookmarked, they will continue to work for the foreseeable future.
Finally, a thank you to my Patreon sponsors. Following some fantastic advice in a Ted talk by Amanda Palmer, I asked for support and you responded. My 9-5 pays the bills, so I've been able to redistribute those Patreon donations to some individuals creating fantastic resources for others benefit. This past week, I was the first to pledge patronage to Dustin Miller. Dustin Miller is creating an entirely approachable and fascinating look at how data scientists and journalists can approach something like the recently released Mueller Report (and all its redactions). Regardless of your political leanings, it is as eye-opening as it is accessible; before the end, I was kicking some code around my IDE because I was so inspired. Thank you for your continued support in helping me elevate others!
Till next time, Matthew
@libel_vox and https://matthewreinbold.com