api - Coffee on the Keyboard

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api

A collection of 7 posts

Photo of a path to an ocean beach with a temporary barrier that says "beach closed"

Introducing API Boundaries to Prepare for Bigger Changes

Alternatively: API Boundaries for Fun and Profit I routinely misquote Kent Beck, who said "for each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change." He said this on Twitter (RIP) so I won't be linking to it, but at least for now

Photo of a woman who has drawn on a whiteboard speaking to another woman, foreground, facing away from the camera.

Code is Knowledge

In the mid-2000s (so, in ancient history) a friend of mine went to an interview at a big tech company and was asked to write the JPEG compression algorithm on a whiteboard. He didn't know that algorithm off the top of his head, which he admitted, and then made up

A close up of wires plugged into a sound board.

Building Extensibility into APIs from the Start

Making the right design decisions early in a project can have a huge impact on the ability to safely improve and evolve it over time.

Photograph of a red carpet partly rolled out on grass.

Caller-controlled Rollouts

Slightly warm take warning: not everything needs to be feature-flagged. New APIs or API endpoints, for example, that have no callers yet, don't benefit from the ability to toggle them off. If nothing is executing this code, then there's no behavior to disable. Let's say we have an API for

Irregular Update, 24/Oct/2014

Another update! Wow! The past two weeks have all been on TodaysMeet Teacher Tools [https://todaysmeet.com/about/teachertools] except for the afternoon I spent dealing with a hurt finger (not exactly badly hurt but I still can’t really use my right index finger to type, it’s annoying)

The Thing About Twitter

The thing that bothers me most about Twitter’s API announcement [http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_thread/thread/c82cd59c7a87216a?pli=1] is that very few of the most useful features of Twitter were actually their ideas. * Hashtags. * Retweets. * Location. * Search. * Lists. * Conversation view. * Inline images and links. * Short

Widget l10n

I spent some of today working on bringing a couple of WordPress widgets up-to-date (Better Search [http://jamessocol.com/projects/better-search-widget.php] and Most Comments [http://jamessocol.com/projects/most-comments-widget.php]) only to discover there is a new widget API [http://codex.wordpress.org/Widgets_API#Developing_Widgets_on_2.