Technology Commentary

I am profiling APIs for APIs.io. I started with Twilio and Stripe, and working my way through many more. I am profiling their API operations using APIs.json, outlining their business approach to doing APIs, but I am also making sure the surface area of each API is profiled using an OpenAPI, profiling the technical dimension of each API. This work is tedious, but worth it. When you get the details of both the business and technical details of an API available in a machine-readable way, you end up with new found API discovery abilities to see which API providers are producing raw API resources, shaping our core digital capabilities, and which are contributing to more meaningful, or at least useful digital experiences.

An alternative to Docker, Nix offers cross-platform reproducibility to app deployment, and Flox will offer some much needed management, security and collaboration features.

Is it ethical to make an open source product commercial? Your first ethical obligation is to yourself and your employees, say founders.

Last weekend was my first race of the year — a 10K on the same course where, back in August, I ran my first race in New York City. That race went so poorly — my worst race, and not just because I ran it slower than the half marathon I’d

The personal website of Knut Magnus Aasrud

What is QUIC protocol and how does it work ?

Uber created a new load-shedding library for its microservice platform, serving over 130 million customers and handling aggregated peaks of millions of requests per second (RPSs). The company replaced the solution based on QALM with Cinnamon library, which, in addition to graceful degradation, can dynamically and continuously adjust the capacity of the service and the amount of load shedding.

Microsoft’s decision to introduce sudo for Windows is strangely symbolic of how influential UNIX has been even on non-UNIX ecosystems.

I love that when I post something as mundane as my coffee drinking on LinkedIn I can muster upwards of 50 reactions to it, but when I post something critical of artificial intelligence I get one or two. I regularly see folks chant that if you aren’t talking about AI, nobody will read it. I don’t give a shit about AI because it doesn’t benefit me in any way (currently). During the last AI wave I pretended to give a shit because I was dependent on being part of the mainstream API chorus. While everyone is hyper focused on AI because their lives (jobs) depend on it, I am exploring what is needed to make sense of the API sprawl at scale. I am not sure what the answer is, but spoiler alert, it won’t be artificial intelligence.

WebAssembly's structure signifies its capability to provide isolation, allowing tunneled deployments between endpoints and APIs.

Posted on Wednesday 7 Feb 2024. 1,471 words, 2 links. By Matt Webb.

An old document I surfaced with my quick tour of distributed systems theory fundamentals

I believe we are at the threshold of a new programming paradigm. As the latest advancements in AI make it more accessible and closer to a self-hosted utility, we are entering a world in which developers can articulate what they want to achieve in simple natural language terms. I call this paradigm semantic programming.

An API should be easy to learn and write to, and hard to misuse. Your API will also need to evolve, and a good design takes this into account.

Let’s talk about what makes monorepos so flexible, powerful and fun to work in day to day.

An intuition for distributed consensus in OLTP systems

The shouts of the RESTafarians in 2010 still ring loud in my head. REST wasn’t just a philosophy, it was a religion. You needed to have read Roy Fielding’s dissertation and posses a strong handle on the four levels of REST maturity, otherwise you were doing IT WRONG!!! Folks rarely demonstrated what they were talking about, and almost always shamed you when you didn’t emulate what they were talking about in your work. Maybe I am just too sensitive, but it was this dogma that pushed me to start API Evangelist to help others understand what was going on without shaming them.

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Don MacVittie asks vendors: Don’t tell us how you can control other vendors' tools; tell us how you’re making it easier to manage yours.

with Ethan Zuckerman This is a draft of a chapter from Chand’s and Ethan’s forthcoming “A Field Guide to Social Media,” coming next year on MIT Press. We’d love your feedback on what we have so far, so please share your thoughts in the comments. When we set out to write this book, centered around […]

I’m working on two kits at once: A Lego Technic Perseverance kit, and a “hello world” spoon using a beginner’s whittling kit. They could not be more different, yet I can see why both deserve to be …

When a codebase is large and complex, it's risky to big changes. Here's a structured way to approach the problem.

Strategies for Internet citizens

Last month ago I wrote a column for Wired.com, Rebooting web comments, that attracted some unsavory feedback. Had the flamers read beyond the second paragraph they might have seen that I wasn&#8217…

We need hubs that syndicate to and from personal clouds. It will do wonders not only for academic discourse, but also for the entire web, writes Jon Udell.

If I were czar of the Net (were such a thing even possible) I wouldn't require use of verified identities. Rather I'd want to ensure that everyone, identified or not, can own and control their online speech, writes Jon Udell.

Update: For a simpler formulation of the ideas in this essay, see Doug Belshaw’s Working openly on the web: a manifesto. Back in 2000, the patterns, principles, and best practices for buildin…

Today we do business the hard way, using phone calls and faxes and piles of papers on our desks, and we do it poorly. I'm hoping our personal clouds will enable us to do it easily and well.