Permalink: 20230531232401

Found on What I Learned From Interviewing Potential Users Before Designing an API | Postman Blog on 2023-05-31 23:24:01 +02:00.

My post about interviewing users before designing an API has finally been published. It took quite a while and lots of editing and here it is.

As I began conducting the interviews, the feedback I obtained from real people representing each user persona was essential. These interviews allowed me to better understand the needs and pain points of the various users, which helped validate some of my initial assumptions and provided me with new insights.

Permalink: 20230531232016

Found on twittercommunitynotes: Documentation and source code powering Twitter’s Community Notes on 2023-05-31 23:20:16 +02:00.

Community Notes aims to create a better informed world, by empowering people on Twitter to add helpful notes to Tweets that might be misleading.

Permalink: 20230531231815

Found on The Artificial Intelligence Act | on 2023-05-31 23:18:15 +02:00.

The AI Act is a proposed European law on artificial intelligence (AI) – the first law on AI by a major regulator anywhere. The law assigns applications of AI to three risk categories. First, applications and systems that create an unacceptable risk, such as government-run social scoring of the type used in China, are banned. Second, high-risk applications, such as a CV-scanning tool that ranks job applicants, are subject to specific legal requirements. Lastly, applications not explicitly banned or listed as high-risk are largely left unregulated.

Permalink: 20230531231607

Found on OpenAI’s plans according to Sam Altman on 2023-05-31 23:16:07 +02:00.

It sounds like Sam Altman doesn’t see ChatGPT as a potential API marketplace.

A lot of developers are interested in getting access to ChatGPT plugins via the API but Sam said he didn’t think they’d be released any time soon. The usage of plugins, other than browsing, suggests that they don’t have PMF yet. He suggested that a lot of people thought they wanted their apps to be inside ChatGPT but what they really wanted was ChatGPT in their apps.

Permalink: 20230531141841

Found on Make Hugo generate a JSON search index and JSON Feed – xdeb.org on 2023-05-31 14:18:41 +02:00.

Hugo has one built in JSON output format and here I use that for the JSON Feed. If needed this could also be a custom output format.

Permalink: 20230531120346

Found on Any feed to Mastodon · Actions · GitHub Marketplace on 2023-05-31 12:03:46 +02:00.

This looks like a good way to automatically publish notes I write here into my mastodon.

A GitHub Action that creates messages (toots) on your Mastodon account from a RSS/Atom/JSON feed’s items.

This should be a simple way to POSSE — Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere — content from your blog to your Mastodon account.

Permalink: 20230530185838

Found on Paragraphica - Bjørn Karmann on 2023-05-30 18:58:38 +02:00.

Paragraphica is a camera that uses location data and artificial intelligence to visualize a “photo” of a specific place and moment. The camera exists both as a physical prototype and a virtual camera that you can try.

Permalink: 20230530185701

Found on Paragraphica – Context to image (AI) camera – CreativeApplications.Net on 2023-05-30 18:57:01 +02:00.

The camera operates by collecting data from its location using open APIs. Utilising the address, weather, time of day, and nearby places, Paragraphica creates a paragraph that details a representation of the current place and moment. Using a text-to-image API, the camera converts the paragraph into a unique visualization. The resulting “photo” is not just a snapshot, but a complex and nuanced reflection of the location you are at.

Permalink: 20230530164731

Found on LinkML - Linked data Modeling Language - LinkML - Linked data Modeling Language on 2023-05-30 16:47:31 +02:00.

LinkML is a general purpose modeling language that can be used with linked data, JSON, and other formalisms

Permalink: 20230530150921

I’ve been fiddling with a way to automatically post a note to my mastodon instance. My idea is to have a GitHub action pushing the latest notes to mastodon. I’m not sure yet how I’ll figure out what the latest notes are but I’ll get there.

Permalink: 20230530120015

Found on Textcasting on 2023-05-30 12:00:15 +02:00.

We’re at a good moment where there is no dominant feed reader or microblogging site. It’s a fluid situation. New entrants could compete on the basis of how compatible they are with their competitors. The users would like to hear about that. It’s a good time to get in at the beginning of something that could be even bigger than podcasting, for text.

Permalink: 20230530114843

Following my experiment with creating a prototype for the Open Technologies Knowledge Base using Retool, I tried using Figma. I can’t say I had a good experience. First of all, Figma feels complicated. Also, there’s no clear way to make a prototype work with live data. There are plugins that help you pull data from an API into a Figma component. However, the data then remains static during the lifetime of the prototype, unless you refresh it manually. I’ll continue investigating to see if there’s a better approach than the one I’ve been trying.

Permalink: Postman Open Technologies Knowledge Base prototype UI

Retool chart data source configuration. I had to make adjustments to the data source to make the data shape compatible with what Retool was expecting.

Postman Open Technologies Knowledge Base is an experimental project dedicated to mining and extracting knowledge from across the API universe. This is a prototype UI that consumes an early version of the Knowledge Base API. The goal of this prototype UI is to allow stakeholders to explore interacting with the Knowledge Base API and provide feedback that leads to improvements in the API design.

The prototype was built using Retool and required almost no coding. The only thing I had to change was the response format of the statistics endpoint to make it work well with Retool’s chart component.

Permalink: 20230529171957

Found on API Contract Testing - Visual Guide | LinkedIn on 2023-05-29 17:19:57 +02:00.

Contract Testing is actually quite hard and demands a lot of discipline from the team and organization. Teams should not jump into it unless they reach a certain level of maturity.

Permalink: 20230529110537

Found on All the Hard Stuff Nobody Talks About when Building Products with LLMs | Honeycomb on 2023-05-29 11:05:37 +02:00.

Unfortunately, accepting broad inputs and needing to apply some form of “best practice” on outputs really throws a wrench into prompt engineering efforts. We find that if we experiment with one approach, it improves outputs at the cost of accepting less broad inputs, or vice-versa. There’s a lot more work we can do to improve our prompting, but there’s no apparent playbook we can just use right now.

Permalink: 20230529103336

Found on Modern work requires attention. Constant alerts steal it - Stack Overflow Blog on 2023-05-29 10:33:36 +02:00.

The contemporary workspace, whether in-person or remote, is full of demands on your attention. We have chat programs, email inboxes, and project management apps all throwing notifications our way. In offices, you have other people tapping you on the shoulder and creating general noise

Permalink: 20230526154616

I’m seeing a pattern in the VC space lately. From conversations that I’ve been having with different operators, it looks like there’s lots of cash waiting to be deployed. Most of the cash is ready to be used on pre-seed and seed-stage projects, while there’s also some available for later stages. It feels like the funds have not been totally depleted yet.

Permalink: 20230526100209

Found on vm2 - npm on 2023-05-26 10:02:09 +02:00.

vm2 is a sandbox that can run untrusted code with whitelisted Node’s built-in modules. Securely!

Permalink: 20230526094146

Found on Generative AI: Revelling in its potential while we grapple with the unknown — K Fund on 2023-05-26 09:41:46 +02:00.

In the presentation, you will get to know our vision on Generative AI, how we’ve built our AI portfolio, the particularities of the Spanish startup scene, and the challenges it faces. It also includes insights from the founders of our portfolio and how tech giants and startups are deploying the technology. It concludes with a reflection on the significant unresolved challenges and a message about the importance of human qualities in this new AI era.

Permalink: 20230525184212

Found on AI Canon | Andreessen Horowitz on 2023-05-25 18:42:12 +02:00.

in this post, we’re sharing a curated list of resources we’ve relied on to get smarter about modern AI. We call it the “AI Canon” because these papers, blog posts, courses, and guides have had an outsized impact on the field over the past several years.

Permalink: 20230525175640

Found on The end of King Dollar? The forces at play in de-dollarisation | Reuters on 2023-05-25 17:56:40 +02:00.

It’s interesting to see the effort that’s been taken to kill the US dollar. This is a long-term game that’s still going to take some time. However, its repercussions are yet to be fully understood. One is that US dollars become more and more rare outside of the United States.

The dollar share of central banks’ foreign reserves in the final quarter of 2022 did hit a two-decade low, but the move has been gradual and it is now at almost a similar level as 1995.

Another obvious repercussion is that countries stepping away from the US dollar face a sudden increase in exchange rate volatility. Whether you like it or not, having a currency indexed to the US dollar creates stability.

Permalink: 20230525122004

Found on Documentation · cdimascioexpress-openapi-validator Wiki on 2023-05-25 12:20:04 +02:00.

This is an interesting approach to building an API-design-first server.

Don’t want to manually map your OpenAPI endpoints to Express handler functions? express-openapi-validator can do it for you, automatically!

Permalink: 20230525104031

I first wrote about the API Hierarchy of Needs in 2013. I got inspired by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and defined the layered needs of an API consumer.

The API hierarchy of needs. Inspired by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the pyramid represents the layered needs of API consumers by order of importance.

The layers are stacked by order of importance, with the one with the most priority at the very bottom.

• Usability: is your API easy to use by new consumers?
• Functionality: does your API work as advertised?
• Reliability: does your API perform consistently over time?
• Proficiency: does your API increase the skills of consumers?
• Creativity: can your API be used in unexpected and creative ways?

Permalink: 20230524155547

Found on Guides and Resources TODO: Talk openly, develop openly on 2023-05-24 15:55:47 +02:00.

The TODO Group offers a Maturity Model, a set of Guides, a Mind Map, a 101 Course, Annual Surveys, as well as Case Studies, to help organizations advance in their OSPO journey. These OSPO resources are developed by the TODO Group in collaboration with The Linux Foundation and the larger open source community. We expect these resources to be living documents that evolve via community contributions.

Permalink: 20230524142306

Found on We Can Do Better Than SQL | EdgeDB Blog on 2023-05-24 14:23:06 +02:00.

SQL started with a goal to empower non-programmers to work with the relational data effectively. Despite its shortcomings, it has arguably been wildly successful, with most databases implementing or emulating it. However, like any solution, SQL is facing increasing inadequacy in the support of the new requirements, modes of use and user productivity. It is time we do something about it.

Permalink: 20230524102923

Found on Programming with Natural Language Is Actually Going to Work—Stephen Wolfram Writings on 2023-05-24 10:29:23 +02:00.

This quote is from an article written in 2010.

How far will it be possible to get with natural language programming? Even six months ago I thought it was only going to be possible to do fairly simple examples. But seeing what we’ve actually been able to build, I’m extremely optimistic about what will be possible.

Permalink: 20230523180203

Found on webapicookbookhyper: sample project for an interactive hypermedia shell on 2023-05-23 18:02:03 +02:00.

The hyper utility is a simple command-line style shell/REPL for interacting with an online services/APIs. While a fully-functional HTTP client, hyper is especially good at dealing with hypermedia services including Collection+JSON, SIREN, and HAL. There are plans to add support for PRAG+JSON, MASH+JSON, and possibly UBER in the future.

Permalink: 20230523170137

Found on How Rogue AIs may Arise - Yoshua Bengio on 2023-05-23 17:01:37 +02:00.

A potentially rogue AI is an autonomous AI system that could behave in ways that would be catastrophically harmful to a large fraction of humans, potentially endangering our societies and even our species or the biosphere.

Permalink: 20230523155448

Found on draft-ietf-httpbis-safe-method-w-body-03 on 2023-05-23 15:54:48 +02:00.

This specification defines a new HTTP method, QUERY, as a safe, idempotent request method that can carry request content.

Permalink: 20230523152011

Found on a LinkedIn post on 2023-05-23 15:20:11 +02:00.

Showing up and being in a meeting in-person has positive outcomes. Here’s a great story shared by my friend Miguel Coquet.

I met a junior dev who had built an impressive network simply by showing up - to school, to work, to networking events. This was a stark contrast to some talented engineers I knew who had fewer connections due to living outside of bustling urban centers

Permalink: 20230523112356

Found on Do scientific meetings matter? Turning up for talks brings surprise benefits on 2023-05-23 11:23:56 +02:00.

In-person meetings and conferences have better results than remote ones.

Scientists who have attended meetings are more likely to cite work discussed in talks they could see in person, compared with results described in sessions that they could not attend1. That citation bump from in-person attendance accrues even for talks that conference attendees hadn’t planned on listening to.

Permalink: 20230523094600

Found on fairseqexamplesmms at main · facebookresearchfairseq · GitHub on 2023-05-23 09:46:00 +02:00.

This could be possibly used to scale human-to-AI interaction in thousands of languages.

The Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) project expands speech technology from about 100 languages to over 1,000 by building a single multilingual speech recognition model supporting over 1,100 languages (more than 10 times as many as before), language identification models able to identify over 4,000 languages (40 times more than before), pretrained models supporting over 1,400 languages, and text-to-speech models for over 1,100 languages. Our goal is to make it easier for people to access information and to use devices in their preferred language.

Permalink: 20230523094305

Found on csunnyDB-GPT: Interact your data and environment using the local GPT, no data leaks, 100% privately, 100% security on 2023-05-23 09:43:05 +02:00.

This is at the intersection of AI and query languages. What’s interesting is that it’s able to generate SQL from human language.

DB-GPT is an experimental open-source project that uses localized GPT large models to interact with your data and environment. With this solution, you can be assured that there is no risk of data leakage, and your data is 100% private and secure.

Permalink: 20230522124530

Found on Rachel Woods on Twitter: “Has anyone experienced or studied prompt drift? When prompts were performing well at one point in time, but due to model changes, degrade in performance? Seeing this on one of our projects.” Twitter on 2023-05-22 12:45:30 +02:00.

Here’s something interesting that shows that human language isn’t the best way to interact with AI and expect consistent results.

Has anyone experienced or studied prompt drift? When prompts were performing well at one point in time, but due to model changes, degrade in performance? Seeing this on one of our projects.

Permalink: 20230522101456

Found on Build a Successful API by Understanding User Personas | Postman Blog on 2023-05-22 10:14:56 +02:00.

This is an article I wrote about the importance of aligning your API Design with user personas.

Altogether, the different attributes of user personas can continuously inform how I design an API that reflects what potential consumers need. And that is critical to making an API successful.

Permalink: 20230521190526

Looking outside. A capture of the feeling of being at rest, listening to the wind slowly blowing on the palm tree outside.

Permalink: 20230519111120

Found on Dynatrace Query Language | Dynatrace Docs on 2023-05-19 11:11:20 +02:00.

Another interesting query language, with goals similar to ESQL from Elastic.

Dynatrace Query Language (DQL) is a powerful tool to explore your data and discover patterns, identify anomalies and outliers, create statistical modeling, and more based on data stored in Dynatrace Grail storage.

DQL offers maximum flexibility because it is built for processing arbitrary event data, requiring no up-front description of the input data’s schema contrary to relational databases like SQL tables.

Permalink: 20230519095514

Found on What’s Next for API Portals? | Postman Blog on 2023-05-19 09:55:14 +02:00.

Establishing a single portal for API discovery is a logical objective, but it may not fully address the diverse needs of API consumers, especially as the number of APIs continues to grow exponentially. A modern API consumer experience extends beyond the traditional portal and documentation typically associated with API operations. It demands greater engagement, contextualization, and delivery of information in digestible and actionable units.

Permalink: 20230519094628

Found on Introduction to Elasticsearch query language | Elastic Blog on 2023-05-19 09:46:28 +02:00.

Elastic introduced ESQL in November 2022.

ESQL is more than a language. It represents a significant investment in new compute capabilities within Elasticsearch. To achieve both the functional and performance requirements for ESQL, it is necessary to build an entirely new compute architecture. ESQL search, aggregation, and transformation functions are directly executed within Elasticsearch itself. Query expressions are not transpiled to QueryDSL for execution. Rather, we have built native support for ESQL functions within Elasticsearch.

However, in August 2022, IBM did an update on their documentation about ESQL (yes, the exact same acronym).

Extended Structured Query Language (ESQL) is a programming language defined by IBM® Integration Bus to define and manipulate data within a message flow.

There are more ESQLs. Doing a quick search reveals at least a handful of other variants.

Permalink: 20230517201451

Found on Jargon on 2023-05-17 20:14:51 +02:00.

Domain Driven Design for APIs and Enterprise Data Modelling

Stop drawing pictures in powerpoint and start using DevOps processes for modelling. Get your whole team to help out while you’re at it.

Permalink: Areas of Product Management

I find this an interesting way of seeing Product Management:

• Product vision describes the destination.
• Product strategy defines which problems to solve.
• Product discovery identifies the tactics to solve those problems.
• Product delivery builds the solutions.

This is adapted from a talk by Marty Cagan.

Permalink: 20230517111427

Found on 3 Persona Types: Lightweight, Qualitative, and Statistical on 2023-05-17 11:14:27 +02:00.

There are 3 different ways that teams can create personas, depending on the research data in which they are rooted:

1. Proto personas, meant to quickly align the team’s existing assumptions about who their users are, but not based on (new) research
2. Qualitative personas, based on small-sample qualitative research, such as interviews,  usability tests, or field studies
3. Statistical personas, where initial qualitative research informs a survey instrument that is used to gather a large sample size, and the personas emerge from statistical analysis

Permalink: 20230517104315

Found on The Technium: 1,000 True Fans on 2023-05-17 10:43:15 +02:00.

To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.

I’m revisiting this great post by Kevin Kelly after having watched his interview with Tim Ferriss.

Permalink: 20230517102912

Found on Why we created Taxi, and why we felt the need for Another Schema Language - Orbital on 2023-05-17 10:29:12 +02:00.

TaxiQL is part of the Taxi Spec - it’s a query language that lets consumers ask for data they want using the same semantic types that producers have embedded in their API specs.

It’s interesting to see another query language popping up. The company behind it, Orbital, evaluated several alternatives and didn’t find anything that would be a good fit. They mention that with Taxi, software can orchestrate automation between APIs automagically.

Permalink: Hugo-powered notes

If this works it means that the new build system using hugo is working fine.

Permalink: 20230510140415

Found at Bye Bye Swagger and Postman — Built-in Rest Client of VS 2022 | by Atakan Korez | Mar, 2023 | Medium on 2023-05-10 14:04:15.

Using the .http file, basic HTTP requests can be made without the need for Swagger or Postman. Of course, it is not as capable as Swagger or Postman at the moment, but its capabilities will increase with each VS version update.

Permalink: 20230507232255

Found at So many bad takes — What is there to learn from the Prime Video microservices to monolith story | by adrian cockcroft | May, 2023 | Medium on 2023-05-07 23:22:55.

The Prime Video team had followed a path I call Serverless First, where the first try at building something is put together with Step Functions and Lambda calls. They state in the blog that this was quick to build, which is the point.

Permalink: 20230506103328

Found at LangFlow For LangChain. LangFlow is a GUI for LangChain… | by Cobus Greyling | May, 2023 | Medium on 2023-05-06 10:33:28.

LangFlow is a GUI for LangChain enabling easy experimentation and prototyping of LLM Apps and Prompt Chaining.

Permalink: 20230502095717

Found at Brutalist Web Design on 2023-05-02 09:57:17.

A website is for a visitor, using a browser, running on a computer to read, watch, listen, or perhaps to interact. A website that embraces Brutalist Web Design is raw in its focus on content, and prioritization of the website visitor.

Permalink: 20230428195433

Found at scrapscript on 2023-04-28 19:54:33.

Scrapscript solves the software sharability problem.

Modern software breaks at boundaries. APIs diverge, packages crumble, configs ossify, serialization corrupts, git tangles, dependencies break, documentation dies, vulnerabilities surface, etc.

To make software safe and sharable, scrapscript combines existing wisdom in new ways

Permalink: 20230425095349

Found at Overview - C2PA on 2023-04-25 09:53:49.

An open technical standard providing publishers, creators, and consumers the ability to trace the origin of different types of media.

Permalink: 20230425095300

Found at Why web3? Is it really just million dollar monkeys? — Joaquim Verges on 2023-04-25 09:53:00.

We’re going to need a standard for proving that a piece of media comes from a real camera. We’re going to need a trustable way to tell if an image has been generated or modified, and by which software. This can be achieved using cryptographic signatures. Each hardware and software that creates or modifies a piece of media can sign it with a private key, leaving a digital trace behind. There is ongoing work in that field, a promising one being the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA).

Permalink: 20230424154050

Found at There Is No A.I. | The New Yorker on 2023-04-24 15:40:50.

The most pragmatic position is to think of A.I. as a tool, not a creature. My attitude doesn’t eliminate the possibility of peril: however we think about it, we can still design and operate our new tech badly, in ways that can hurt us or even lead to our extinction. Mythologizing the technology only makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well—and this kind of thinking limits our imaginations, tying them to yesterday’s dreams. We can work better under the assumption that there is no such thing as A.I. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we’ll start managing our new technology intelligently.

Permalink: 20230322120231

Found at MACH Alliance || Enterprise MACHified on 2023-03-22 12:02:31.

The MACH Alliance is a not-for-profit industry body that advocates for open and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystems. The Alliance aims to educate and support the industry as a whole on what to look out for when moving from legacy infrastructure and going composable, including when, where and how to start and select partners. Our role is more important than ever as adoption of MACH continues apace. The Alliance is a vendor-neutral institution that provides resources, education and guidance through industry experts to support companies on their journey.

Permalink: 20230315144838

Found at (56) GPT-4 Developer Livestream - YouTube on 2023-03-15 14:48:38.

The APIs, amid the commotion, are what matter. They’re why Microsoft was willing to release an unproven chatbot into Bing, even when it knew it was a bit crazy. And why the company didn’t seem to mind when the bot’s flaws exploded into public view. It was never about Bing or ChatGPT, but about the potential future they previewed. And now, given the demos’ success, the race to enable that future is underway.

Permalink: 20230314152821

Found at State of API developer portals - Report | Blobr on 2023-03-14 15:28:21.

A detailed review of top 100 API companies about how they expose, manage and monetize their APIs.

Permalink: 20230310233337

Found at Contrasting API Contract Testing and Functional Testing | API Evangelist on 2023-03-10 23:33:37.

Contract testing will only get you so far, but it will get you a lot further down the road than functional testing. The nuance here is really in the detail of what API functionality is at an API, business, or industry level. Most people I encounter who push back on the notion of contract testing are only operating at the API level, or in a very narrow view of business.

Permalink: 20230309121455

Found at OpenAPI Tooling on 2023-03-09 12:14:55.

A collection of open-source and commercial tools for creating your APIs with OpenAPI sourced from and published for the community

Permalink: 20230307190319

Found at kilimchoiengineering-blogs: A curated list of engineering blogs on 2023-03-07 19:03:19.

A curated list of Engineering blogs, including an OPML.

Permalink: 20230301173438

Found at Archetype on 2023-03-01 17:34:38.

Archetype is the revenue stack you won’t have to build. Premade payment pages, analytics, and infinitely flexible pricing models.

Permalink: 20230301154951

Found at Introduction | crul on 2023-03-01 15:49:51.

The crul query language allows you to transform web pages and API requests into a shapeable data set, with built in concepts of expansion into new links, and a processing language to filter, transform and export your data set to a growing collection of common destinations.

Permalink: 20230224154156

Found at Y’all See API Contract Testing Like You Do Terms of Service | API Evangelist on 2023-02-24 15:41:56.

I am not getting pedantic about design. I am getting pedantic about the consumers having a voice before things hit production.

Permalink: 20230223161250

Found at The Art of Storytelling: A Guide to Becoming a More Effective Storytel – IDEO U on 2023-02-23 16:12:50.

Anyone who tells stories is a storyteller. Yes, novelists, film directors, and anyone who’s done a TED Talk would qualify for that title. But it can also be a teacher going over a lesson with students or an engineer sharing a slide deck with a manager. Storytelling plays an important role across many jobs and organizations—in meetings, board rooms, and brainstorms.

Permalink: 20230221114131

Found at Dots Will Be Connected - by L. M. Sacasas on 2023-02-21 11:41:31.

it is entirely possible for serious, educated people to arrive at disparate understandings of reality

Permalink: 20230221113005

Found at What is a design system? | André Torgal on 2023-02-21 11:30:05.

the foundations of a design system - metaphorically what allows it to stand - is a social system of interactions, decision making, and agreement.

Permalink: 20230214142316

Found at The Language-Oriented Approach to API Development - The Language-Oriented Approach to API Development on 2023-02-14 14:23:16.

The Language-Oriented Approach to API Development is a book about a different way to think about the API development lifecycle. In this approach, people create their own language for the way they talk about APIs and capture that language in a DSL.

Permalink: 20230208101758

Found at WTF is API Product Management? on 2023-02-08 10:17:58.

A good API product manager needs to be able to properly identify product opportunities, support the actual development process, collect and act on feedback through multiple iterations, and know how to monitor and measure success for the product. In addition, they need to enable improvements for APIs already released into the market and in use by paying customers.

Permalink: 20230207222525

Found at Why I hate APIs - IOTICS on 2023-02-07 22:25:25.

No surprises what I think is the answer (and I’m not the only one. The Fraunhofer Institute and Ericsson agree on this video). I think semantically-described digital twins operating in ecosystems is the way forward. Especially if you think of digital twins as “nano-API” for one instance of a resource type. A ship, a sewage tank, a person, whatever, but only one of them, not a whole bunch.

Permalink: 20230203160111

Found at 6 Steps to Writing Companion Pieces To Reach New Audiences for Your Forthcoming Book - Writer’s Digest on 2023-02-03 16:01:11.

Companion pieces aren’t only meant to serve as promotion for your upcoming book—they also offer you a chance to break apart the different themes of your work to attract a larger audience.

Permalink: 20230201223349

Found at triggerdotdevtrigger.dev: ✨ Trigger.dev is an open-source platform that makes it easy for developers to create event-driven background tasks directly in their code. on 2023-02-01 22:33:49.

Trigger.dev is an open source platform that makes it easy for developers to create event-driven background tasks directly in their code. Build, test and run workflows locally using our SDK. Subscribe to webhooks, schedule jobs, run background jobs and add long delays easily and reliably. In our web app you get full visibility of every run your workflow has ever made making it easier to monitor and debug.

Permalink: 20230131191540

Found at (10) Incenting Better APIs with API Scoreboards - Shruti Parab, Google - YouTube on 2023-01-31 19:15:40.

Incentive theory explains that behavior is driven by desire for reinforcements and rewards. Can we use this to make APIs easier to use and more trustworthy? API scores and scoreboards can incentivize good API practices: APIs are rewarded for having a good security score, a high design score, and other factors that organizations think are important for good APIs. API scores bring attention to things that organizations care about and help people find ways to improve APIs.

Permalink: 20230131145313

Found at API SCORING. API Scoring is a gamification mechanism… | by Rafa Granados | Jan, 2023 | Medium on 2023-01-31 14:53:13.

API Scoring is a gamification mechanism used to evaluate the quality according to the standards of an API (Application Programming Interface). It assigns a numerical score to an API, considering various factors such as design, documentation or security.

Permalink: 20230130190559

Found at draft-inadarei-api-health-check-06 on 2023-01-30 19:05:59.

This document proposes a service health check response format for HTTP APIs.

Permalink: 20230130182605

Found at API Standards – API Style Guides on 2023-01-30 18:26:05.

This site helps teams create API Style Guides. At the end, you can download the proper linter configuration to help enforce your style guide with Spectral (opens in a new tab) or Optic (opens in a new tab).

Permalink: 20230127110105

Found at Data Flow Diagram on 2023-01-27 11:01:05.

The tighter fit between modeling language and problem domain creates better possibilities for true code generation (high to low abstraction level), in the same way as a compiler generates assembler from higher level code. You would need a tool that allows defining your modeling language and that supports it but these are becoming more and more available (MetaCase, Eclipse MEP GEF and I hear MS Whitehorse is supposed to go a similar direction (Domain-Specific Languages).

Permalink: 20230124153524

Found at Leveling Up APIs at Back Market. According to estimates, The cost of API… | by Samir AMZANI | Jan, 2023 | Back Market Blog on 2023-01-24 15:35:24.

In this blog post, I will guide you through the six stages we use at Back Market to develop and implement our API vision.

Permalink: 20230124150342

Found at Building Blocks for HTTP APIs Working Group on 2023-01-24 15:03:42.

Our mission is to create standard technical specifications to improve use of HTTP for machine-to-machine communications, including HTTP extensions, formats, and best practices.

Permalink: 20230120144559

Found at The Lisa: Apple’s Most Influential Failure - CHM on 2023-01-20 14:45:59.

What is the Apple Lisa computer, and why was its release on January 19, 1983, an important date in computer history? Apple’s Macintosh line of computers today, known for bringing mouse-driven graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to the masses and transforming the way we use our computers, owes its existence to its immediate predecessor at Apple, the Lisa. Without the Lisa, there would have been no Macintosh—at least in the form we have it today—and perhaps there would have been no Microsoft Windows either.

Permalink: 20230119182219

Found at API Design Patterns. Disclaimer: this post includes… | by Nicolas Fränkel | Jan, 2023 | Medium on 2023-01-19 18:22:19.

API Design Patterns falls short of being a reference book. Nonetheless, it’s a great book that I recommend to any developer entering the world of APIs or even one with more experience to round up their knowledge.

Permalink: 20230119165819

Found at About Pew Research Center | Pew Research Center on 2023-01-19 16:58:19.

Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. We conduct public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research. We do not take policy positions.

Permalink: 20230117192400

Found at Synth on 2023-01-17 19:24:00.

Synth is an open source data-as-code tool that provides a simple CLI workflow for generating consistent data in a scalable way.

Permalink: 20230117110124

Found at History of APIs | API Evangelist on 2023-01-17 11:01:24.

History is everything. Understanding where we have come from is critical to knowing where we are going. While pushing forward with the latest technology, it is always healthy to pause and take a look at that past–so let’s take a look at the history of APIs.

Permalink: 20230111145313

Found at An API Generator for R • plumber on 2023-01-11 14:53:13.

Plumber allows you to create a web API by merely decorating your existing R source code with roxygen2-like comments.

Permalink: 20230111144942

Found at The Computer Science Book: a complete introduction to computer science in one book on 2023-01-11 14:49:42.

Learn the computer science foundations you need to jump start your career. Ten chapters covering all the career-essential topics.

Permalink: Testing Without Mocks

Found at James Shore: Testing Without Mocks: A Pattern Language on 2023-01-09 19:52:21.

The patterns combine sociable, state-based tests with a novel infrastructure technique called “Nullables.” At first glance, Nullables look like test doubles, but they’re actually production code with an “off” switch. And that’s the tradeoff: do you want that in your production code? Your answer determines whether this pattern language is for you.

Very interesting approach to doing testing without using mocks. This is a very long read. However, it’s well structured and can be done in takes.

Permalink: 20230109173951

Found at How we built the Tinder API Gateway | by Tinder | Tinder Tech Blog | Medium on 2023-01-09 17:39:51.

Tinder API Gateway (TAG) is one of the critical frameworks at Tinder that solves the need of exposing public APIs and enforcing strict authorization and security rules. It’s engineered to meet Tinder’s custom need to fit perfectly in its current cloud infrastructure, and can be scaled as required and maintained without any external support.

Permalink: 20230109173918

Found at What is an API Product? Design better APIs with a product mindset on 2023-01-09 17:39:18.

“API Products” are mentioned relatively often, and there are different ways to look at the topic. None of them is inherently “right” or “wrong”, and we’ll discuss the two most important flavors of API products in this blog post. Whenever you have conversations about API products, it can be helpful to make sure that everybody is talking about the same thing, and understanding the two main perspectives can help with that.

Permalink: 20230109173746

Found at GTM and Strategy.pdf - Google Drive on 2023-01-09 17:37:46.

How competitive is the industry? Are there existing customers?

Permalink: 20230109173600

Found at Deep work. Essentialism in asynchronous culture – jorzel – Backend developer with special interest in software design, architecture and system modelling. Trying to stay in a continuous learning mindset. Like refactoring, clean code, DDD and TDD on 2023-01-09 17:36:00.

you must protect your time and do not let it be (un)designed by chance and other people. The crucial thing is to find the proper balance between satisfying communication and creative effort.

Permalink: 20230109173457

Found at Rowy - Low-code backend on Google Cloud and Firebase on 2023-01-09 17:34:57.

Build your product backend in low-code, scalably. Connect to your database and create cloud functions - without leaving your browser. Focus on building your apps.

Permalink: 20230109173347

Found at Where the fastest-growing Product Management teams share … on 2023-01-09 17:33:47.

Sharebird helps you discover tips and best practices from leaders in your field around your hardest work problems

Permalink: 20230109173311

Found at Scaling Up Engineering Productivity on 2023-01-09 17:33:11.

How effective is your engineering team? Whether you’re an investor, an executive, a teammate, or a stakeholder, knowing whether the organization is effective is a critical but elusive question.

Permalink: 20230109173038

Found at The Five Tools of Hedonic Design - by Adam Mastroianni on 2023-01-09 17:30:38.

Psychologists have known for fifty years that people tend to adjust to the good things that happen to them, ending up about as happy as they ever were. It’s called the hedonic treadmill: chase after happiness and the treadmill speeds up just enough to keep you right where you are.

Permalink: 20230109172925

Found at The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online - David Perell on 2023-01-09 17:29:25.

The game of online writing rewards people who publish consistently. Though frequency is the price of entry, quality writing is a force multiplier on your success. If your ideas resonate, the number of opportunities available to you will explode.

Permalink: 20230109172741

Found at POSSE - IndieWeb on 2023-01-09 17:27:41.

POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content.

Permalink: 20221222164204

Found at Who Invented the API? | Nordic APIs | on 2022-12-22 16:42:04.

The question of who invented the API is a little like asking who discovered Antarctica – the answers are as varied as the parties that submit them, and there’s little agreement as to a hard and fast date. The question becomes even more complex due to the nature of an API (which we will discuss shortly) – that being said, we can at least start with some of the earliest conceptual formations towards the idea of an API with the work of Wilkes, Wheeler, and Gill.

Permalink: 20221222163254

Found at Why the super rich are inevitable on 2022-12-22 16:32:54.

A few decades ago, physicists got involved in studying inequality. They normally study the physical world – like how two balls might interact when they hit each other. But they started using their methods to study economics – a field now dubbed econophysics. Instead of looking at how two balls interact, they looked at how two people might interact in a transaction, and then modeled how that might play out on a large scale. This helped them model wealth distribution.

Permalink: 20221222162005

Found at Deep work. Essentialism in asynchronous culture – jorzel – Backend developer with special interest in software design, architecture and system modelling. Trying to stay in a continuous learning mindset. Like refactoring, clean code, DDD and TDD on 2022-12-22 16:20:05.

you must protect your time and do not let it be (un)designed by chance and other people. The crucial thing is to find the proper balance between satisfying communication and creative effort.

Permalink: 20221222161925

Found at jgmdjot: A light markup language on 2022-12-22 16:19:25.

Djot is a light markup syntax. It derives most of its features from commonmark, but it fixes a few things that make commonmark’s syntax complex and difficult to parse efficiently. It is also much fuller-featured than commonmark, with support for definition lists, footnotes, tables, several new kinds of inline formatting (insert, delete, highlight, superscript, subscript), math, smart punctuation, attributes that can be applied to any element, and generic containers for block-level, inline-level, and raw content.

Permalink: 20221222161701

Found at API Versioning done right!. Yes, I finally cracked it! | by Valentin Nagacevschi | Dec, 2022 | Medium on 2022-12-22 16:17:01.

The present proposal consider the resource-level versioning implementation using optional query parameter the most appropriate one.

Permalink: 20221222161600

Found at Attribute-Based Access Control in a Microservices Architecture | by Chetan Dravekar | Globant | Medium on 2022-12-22 16:16:00.

Using a customized ABAC POC, we can easily perform authorization and authentication over different microservices at runtime without changing the actual application code.

Permalink: 20221202170357

Found at OpenAPI Bot on 2022-12-02 17:03:57.

Chat with the bot to get up to speed with a Web API.
Quickly discover what you can do with the API
without having to go through all its documentation pages

Permalink: 20221122112537

Found at Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?—Asterisk on 2022-11-22 11:25:37.

In 2019 there were about 648 million people living in extreme poverty, subsisting on the equivalent of $2.15 per day or less. Those 648 million people made up 8.4% of world population — representing an improvement over 1990, when 35.9% of people lived on that little. Yet even though extreme poverty has fallen, in 2018 about 80% of the world population still had material living standards less than one-third of that in the United States.

Permalink: 20221117094835

Found at The Distributed Computing Manifesto | All Things Distributed on 2022-11-17 09:48:35.

Over the next two decades, Amazon would move from a monolith to a service-oriented architecture, to microservices, then to microservices running over a shared infrastructure platform. All of this was being done before terms like service-oriented architecture existed. Along the way we learned a lot of lessons about operating at internet scale.

Permalink: 20221116153407

Found at enso-orgenso: Hybrid visual and textual functional programming. on 2022-11-16 15:34:07.

Enso is an award-winning interactive programming language with dual visual and textual representations. It is a tool that spans the entire stack, going from high-level visualisation and communication to the nitty-gritty of backend services, all in a single language. Watch the following introduction video to learn what Enso is, and how it helps companies build data workflows in minutes instead of weeks.

Permalink: 20221114183002

Found at The Age of Social Media Is Ending - The Atlantic on 2022-11-14 18:30:02.

The toxicity of social media makes it easy to forget how truly magical this innovation felt when it was new. From 2004 to 2009, you could join Facebook and everyone you’d ever known—including people you’d definitely lost track of—was right there, ready to connect or reconnect. The posts and photos I saw characterized my friends’ changing lives, not the conspiracy theories that their unhinged friends had shared with them. LinkedIn did the same thing with business contacts, making referrals, dealmaking, and job hunting much easier than they had been previously. I started a game studio in 2003, when LinkedIn was brand new, and I inked our first deal by working connections there.

Permalink: 20221110190134

Found at Only Solve One New Problem At A Time on 2022-11-10 19:01:34.

The whole point of running a company is to solve problems. As Alex teases in the episode, if they weren’t solving any problems, they’d be out of business. But, when it comes to solving problems, Alex stresses that only one new problem should be solved at a time.

Permalink: 20221110153317

Found at GitHub stars won’t pay your rent on 2022-11-10 15:33:17.

when you give away something completely for free, people aren’t that motivated to pay for it. It’s just how humans think, there’s nothing new here.

Permalink: 20221106185954

Found at API Review at scale: An Interview with Alex Savage | Optic on 2022-11-06 18:59:54.

Alex Savage talks about the human side of APIs and how to start API reviews in large organizations with 100s of teams. He shares tips and some hard-won lessons about getting developers excited to build great APIs, and what it takes to support developers across a large organization and help them build high-quality, consistent APIs that their consumers love using.

Permalink: 20221106185248

Found at Clear Writing Means Clear Thinking Means… on 2022-11-06 18:52:48.

If you are a manager, you constantly face the problem of putting words on paper. If you are like most managers, this is not the sort of problem you enjoy. It is hard to do, and time-consuming; and the task is doubly difficult when, as is usually the case, your words must be designed to change the behavior of others in the organization.

Permalink: 20221104113952

Found at ActivityPub on 2022-11-04 11:39:52.

The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the [ActivityStreams] 2.0 data format. It provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and content.

Permalink: 20221028100922

Found at Why is Markdown popular? - Russell Beattie’s Notes on 2022-10-28 10:09:22.

I truly loathe Markdown. Truly. But given the widespread use of Markdown, it might seem strange that I have such aversion to it. If you somehow really like it, or are so used to it by now, you might be tempted to think I’m the oddball.

Interesting opinion. To me, Markdown is not a format. Instead, it’s a way of writing that follows a limited set of conventions and can be easily extended. The amount of conventions—or features—that you can use depends on the tool that you’re using to render the Markdown content.

Permalink: 20221025125145

Found at Why falling in love with the problem is one of the most important aspects of Design Thinking on 2022-10-25 12:51:45.

Falling in love with the problem means accepting your ideas might be wrong. It means the solution that’s in front of you, regardless of how much work you’ve put into it, isn’t valuable until it’s been successfully tested with the real end user. Most importantly it means that ideas are not precious, but the problem is.

Permalink: 20221025114450

Found at Focusing on Problems When Defining a New API | API Evangelist on 2022-10-25 11:44:50.

I immediately began rattling off the solutions this API would provide. Bruno patiently paused me and said that we should focus on problems before we plan any possible solution. Bruno’s focus on problems reminded me of how I easily slip into API solutionism and get right to work demonstrating how APIs will fix anything without ever actually describing a real world problem.

Permalink: 20221024115515

I’m starting a new project related to API Product Management. At first, I thought of writing down the thesis of the project and starting working right away. Then I thought of following the “lean startup” methodology to actually understand why the project is interesting and who would be interested in learning more.

Permalink: What is an API?

Here’s a summary of different ways of defining what an API is:

• A communication language.
• A language.
• A promise.
• A socket (electrical).
• A mediator.
• A contract.

References #

• Tweet about the definition of API, May 2022.
• What are Web APIs blog post, November 2017.

Permalink: 20221021105450

Found at Hyrum’s Law on 2022-10-21 10:54:50.

Not all consumers depend upon the same implicit interface, but given enough consumers, the implicit interface will eventually exactly match the implementation. At this point, the interface has evaporated: the implementation has become the interface, and any changes to it will violate consumer expectations. With a bit of luck, widespread, comprehensive, and automated testing can detect these new expectations but not ameliorate them.

Permalink: 20221019191108

Found at Marketing learns to speak the C-suite’s language | McKinsey on 2022-10-19 19:11:08.

I think part of the challenge in marketing now is that you have social media champions within the organization today who’ve started a bottom-up effort to transform their businesses, but few of them have the momentum to break through the “glass” ceiling and get to the C-suite

Permalink: 20221019191014

Found at How to Speak the C-Suite’s Language When it Comes to Experience Programs – InMoment on 2022-10-19 19:10:14.

The boardroom loves numbers, which makes them an ideal starting point when making a business case for a CX
program. In a global study we conducted among 10,000 CX professionals, my team found that CX leaders are 93 percent more profitable and enjoy 89 percent higher customer retention levels than their non-CX-savvy peers. CX leaders also tend to have a much higher NPS score. Numbers like these will catch your C-suite’s attention.

Permalink: 20221019111058

Found at Bottleneck #03: Product v Engineering on 2022-10-19 11:10:58.

The key to any successful startup is close collaboration between product and engineering. This sounds easy, but can be incredibly difficult. Both groups may have conflicting goals and different definitions of success that have to be reconciled.

According to the author, the bottleneck can be fixed by identifying the “First Team.”

The First Team mindset was defined by Patrick Lencioni and referenced in many of his works including The Advantage and The Five Dysfunctions Of A Team: A Leadership Fable, and while it’s typically used in relation with the establishment of cross-functional leadership teams as the primary accountability team rather than organizational reports, the same concept is applicable here for product teams.

Permalink: 20221018160131

Found at How Engineering Drives Revenue in an Economic Downturn - The New Stack on 2022-10-18 16:01:31.

A year after BetterCloud implemented Blameless, by revitalizing their incident management and adopting SRE practices, they saw 10% reduced customer churn.

It’s interesting seeing this approach to provide business-related arguments for improving a purely technical function. In this case, the article promotes SRE and incident management. However, the same approach could be followed for API-related promotion material.

Permalink: Thoughts on API Design low-fidelity mockups

I recently asked a question on twitter:

What’s the analog of a low-fidelity mockup for API Design? What tool would you use? Why would it be useful?

I wasn’t expecting much. However, I received a bunch of replies. Most people focused on answering what they’re using for API Design, and not necessarily for doing low-fidelity mockups. Here’s a list of ideas that people shared:

• Darrel Mirrel shares that he uses Mermaid graph diagrams to design and describe resource URLs.
• Erik Wilde writes that he starts with something he calls “API stories.” Those stories inform Erik of the experience that users have while interacting with the API. After figuring out what those stories are, Erik defines how the API will work.
• Heimo Laukkanen explains that he starts by drafting endpoint URLs and descriptions using a Markdown document. He then uses Stoplight mocking to make sense of the API experience before writing any code.
• Luca Ferrari shares that he starts with simple user stories to identify possible endpoints, objects, and interactions.
• Oscar Islas says (in Spanish) that he creates an API mock that always returns a static example. To do that, Oscar uses Postman. However, Oscar recommends using SoapUI for things that are custom and flexible.

It’s interesting to see the diversity in approaches to API Design.

Permalink: 20221017144547

Found at The Senior Shift. It’s now about your impact, not just… | by Camille Fournier | Oct, 2022 | Medium on 2022-10-17 14:45:47.

the person is in the senior role because at some point in the past they had the opportunity to demonstrate impact at a more senior level and they did it. This might have been a matter of pure luck, they were on the right project at the right time to be part of something big. It might be, on the other hand, that they were hired in at that more senior level. This is the backdoor for this system, and the reason that so many people are able to get higher titles by switching companies

Permalink: 20221014154241

Found at Comlink | Superface on 2022-10-14 15:42:41.

Comlink is description language for autonomous APIs. It allows you to declaratively describe your API integrations in a way that separates the design-time semantics from the run-time implementation details. In other words, Comlink allows for defining the words we use to describe the capability of an API separate from the details for implementing that capability.

Permalink: 20221014113318

Found at Influencing People Indirectly Over Time to Obtain the API Change You Seek | API Evangelist on 2022-10-14 11:33:18.

One of the more influential tactics I have in my toolbox involves rarely directly telling people to do things, and opting to indirectly shape how people think through telling stories and planting seeds over time across an increasingly number of relevant channels they are tuned into. You see, most people prefer believing that something was their own idea.

Permalink: 20221011155058

Found at Why we should use real data to design in Figma · Kernel on 2022-10-11 15:50:58.

Designing without real data leads to a whole host of problems #

• We look at the problem through a narrow lens
  We end up focusing on the optimal state, or perfecting pixels, instead of considering all the contexts and use cases someone could experience.
  ‍
• **This increases bias in our work
  **If we take a best guess to fill in the gaps of data ourselves, it’s not representative and relies on our own mental models. So we’re likely to miss things that are meaningful or important to users.
  ‍
• **Because of that, we make worse decisions
  **We can’t fully consider edge cases, errors and all the problems users might face without seeing real data and content in our designs.
  ‍
• **It takes us longer to get to the impact we want
  **When we test static designs, the quality and accuracy of feedback lacks detail. So we delay asking the right questions or spotting things that data would show us instantly. 
  ‍
• **The result? There’s a gap between the designs we make and the product our users interact with
  **This seems almost inevitable given that most tools over index on solving visual problems right now.

Kernel looks like a very interesting tool—at least in concept—that can connect an API to a Figma component to populate it. Unfortunately, at this time, it only works with static JSON documents and with Google Sheets.

A reasonable alternative is the Data Sync plugin.

Permalink: 20221007120838

Found at Consideration for moving from objects to arrays. · Discussion #32 · OAImoonwalk on 2022-10-07 12:08:38.

With a major version bump and an acceptance of breaking changes from OpenAPI 3.x, I’d like to propose moving from JSON object structures to JSON array structures.

I don’t necessarily agree with this proposal. The following is the comment I left on the discussion mentioned above.

Comment #

I believe this proposal is interesting, however it creates a tradeoff between the importance of running query filters on user-provided keys and accessing individual elements.

Let’s start by analyzing the motivation behind this proposal. According to the author, the goal of the proposed change is to make it easier for API practitioners to work with the data represented by OpenAPI definitions.

Specifically, running query filters on names in JSON name-value pairs is difficult for lots of tooling (…)

The examples provided to obtain all the paths that contain the word “pets” make sense. You can clearly see that using JSON object structures makes it harder to obtain all the elements where their keys contain a given string.

On the other hand, accessing individual elements becomes more difficult after the proposed changes. Let’s take the /pets path as an example and see how accessing it directly looks like with JSON object structures versus JSON array structures, using different methods.

While M1 doesn’t convey the big difference in effort when using jq, if you look at the other methods, you will immediately see that there is a degree of difficulty introduced when looking up elements on array structures. Object structures can be easily referenced by their keys in most programming languages, while array structures can’t be referenced by the value of arbitrary keys.

The value of this proposal is, in my opinion, affected by the importance of how you want to read information from an OpenAPI definition. If you feel it’s more important to easily filter name-value pairs, then JSON array structures seem to be the appropriate solution. If, on the other hand, you want to access individual elements as easily as possible, then JSON object structures are the preferred solution.

Permalink: 20221004172032

Found at ApiScout - REST API Client for macOS on 2022-10-04 17:20:32.

ApiScout is one and only HTTP Client tool you will need while building, testing and describing your APIs. It’s built for developers by developers.

Permalink: 20221004160515

Found at 9 Best Books on Product Management in 2022 on 2022-10-04 16:05:15.

Here is the reading list that only involves the best books for product managers to get a competitive advantage and help to build the products that customers love.

Permalink: 20221004155054

Found at What Are Good Traits That Make A Great API Product Managers | Moesif Blog on 2022-10-04 15:50:54.

API product management is a relatively new field with little established knowledge on what is API product management and what a PM should be doing to ensure their API platform is successful.

Permalink: 20221004152942

Found at API Product Management | Toptal on 2022-10-04 15:29:42.

A successful API strategy isn’t about building products; it’s about building potential. Good API product managers recognize this and prioritize the factors that smooth adoption for potential partners.

Permalink: 20220930155927

Found at Pandoc - Pandoc User’s Guide on 2022-09-30 15:59:27.

Templates contain variables, which allow for the inclusion of arbitrary information at any point in the file.

Permalink: 20220930104558

Found at Bertrand Meyer’s technology+ blog » Blog Archive Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages: full book now freely available - Bertrand Meyer’s technology+ blog on 2022-09-30 10:45:58.

The book is a survey of methods for language description, particularly semantics (operational, translational, denotational, axiomatic, complementary) and also serves as an introduction to formal methods. Obviously it would be written differently today but it may still have its use.

Permalink: 20220914194000

Found at Blokness on 2022-09-14 19:40:00.

Blokness main goal is to deliver the most accurate NFT data so developers and builders can create, ship and scale products with speed and reliability.

Permalink: 20220527152032

Found at Passo unopostsfirst-steps-with-the-vale-prose-linter on 2022-05-27 15:20:32.

Vale is one of the most popular prose linters in circulation. Think of it as a robotic reconnaissance team that scouts documentation for stylistic issues before they get to anybody’s eyes. This sort of computer-assisted editing can save you tons of time.

Permalink: 20220527143839

Found at Donald Knuth on work habits, problem solving, and happiness on 2022-05-27 14:38:39.

Life is hard and then you die. You can, however, enjoy the process of living; don’t worry about the fact that you’re going to die. Some bad people have a good life, and some good people have a bad life, and that doesn’t seem fair; but don’t worry about that either. Just think about ways of enjoying the journey.

Permalink: 20220524145300

This is a test note to see if the GitHub action is working properly. If so, the following should happen:

• A link to https://github.com/bpedro/public-notes/blob/main/tags.md should be added under #test
• A link to this file should be added to https://github.com/bpedro/public-notes/blob/main/README.md
• This note should be converted to HTML and PDF
• The whole public notes website should be rebuilt and republished

NOTE: this edit should re-trigger the content processing.

Permalink: 20220519154153

Found at Creating files on GitHub | The GitHub Blog on 2022-05-19 15:41:53.

you can create new files directly on GitHub in any of your repositories.

This is the syntax of the “new file” URL that GitHub understands:

https://github.com/bpedro/public-notes/new/main?filename=/2022/05/19/20220519154200&value=Something%20to%20share.

Permalink: 20220513105045

Found at meirwahawesome-workflow-engines: A curated list of awesome open source workflow engines on 2022-05-13 10:50:45.

A curated list of awesome open source workflow engines

Permalink: 20220513093948

Found at Customer Experience APIs: The missing layer | by Hany Elemary | navalia | Medium on 2022-05-13 09:39:48.

(An Experience API is) a service boundary around customer journeys as an extension to business capabilities. With this approach, we model customer workflows into reusable, channel-agnostic APIs.

Permalink: 20220512105117

Found at Markdoc | A powerful, flexible, Markdown-based authoring framework on 2022-05-12 10:51:17.

From personal blogs to massive documentation sites, Markdoc is a content authoring system that grows with you.

Permalink: 20220506105854

Found at XML-RPC Specification on 2022-05-06 10:58:54.

XML-RPC is a Remote Procedure Calling protocol that works over the Internet.

Permalink: 20220506105829

Found at JSON-RPC 2.0 Specification on 2022-05-06 10:58:29.

JSON-RPC is a stateless, light-weight remote procedure call (RPC) protocol. Primarily this specification defines several data structures and the rules around their processing. It is transport agnostic in that the concepts can be used within the same process, over sockets, over http, or in many various message passing environments. It uses JSON (RFC 4627) as data format.

Permalink: 20220506105741

Found at simple is better - JSON-RPC on 2022-05-06 10:57:41.

Especially for web-applications, it’s sensible to split the frontend (data-presentation, user-I/O) from the “real” application. This cleanly separates the presentation from the logic, and (additionally to the advantages above) simplifies the creation/use of alternative frontends and last but not least improves security because the frontend (usually running with webserver-rights) doesn’t have direct access to the data, but may only call some functions of an other process.

Permalink: 20220505184704

Found at JavaScript Containers on 2022-05-05 18:47:04.

In this emerging server abstraction layer, JavaScript takes the place of Shell. It is quite a bit better suited to scripting than Bash or Zsh. Instead of invoking Linux executables, like shell does, the JavaScript sandbox can invoke Wasm. If you have some computational heavy lifting, like image resizing, it probably makes sense to use Wasm rather than writing it in JS. Just like you wouldn’t write image resizing code in bash, you’d spawn imagemagick.

Permalink: 20220503104128

Found at Design-First Approach to API Development: How to Implement and Why It Works on 2022-05-03 10:41:28.

API-First: This is an increasingly promoted approach. Basically, it means that your organization treats APIs as the core focus with the understanding that they are critical business assets upon which the organization operates. This process is initiated with a contract written in an API description language such as OpenAPI. There’s nothing wrong with this way, and it’s wise to standardize early across a platform or set of products. The problem is that the chosen language and its particulars often dominate and even limit a company’s ability to scale and build for the future. If your API is the most important thing, what does that say about all the people developing it and/or consuming it?

Permalink: 20220427114612

Found at A Self-Authenticating Social Protocol - Bluesky on 2022-04-27 11:46:12.

Bluesky’s mission is to drive the evolution from platforms to protocols. The tools for public conversation should exist outside of private companies as common infrastructure, like the Internet itself. An open and durable decentralized protocol for public conversations can allow users a choice in their experience, creators control over their relationships with their audience, and developers freedom to innovate without permission from a platform.

Permalink: 20220427114433

Found at Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech | Knight First Amendment Institute on 2022-04-27 11:44:33.

This article proposes an entirely different approach—one that might seem counterintuitive but might actually provide for a workable plan that enables more free speech, while minimizing the impact of trolling, hateful speech, and large-scale disinformation efforts. As a bonus, it also might help the users of these platforms regain control of their privacy. And to top it all off, it could even provide an entirely new revenue stream for these platforms. That approach: build protocols, not platforms.

Permalink: 20220422120159

Found at Art Bits from HyperCard on 2022-04-22 12:01:59.

Apple packaged in some sample HyperCard stacks to get people up to speed with the software, including one called “Art Bits”, which included a ton of sample clip art for use in your own stacks. This stack is fantastic for showing off just how much Apple could do with two colors.

Permalink: 20220421104520

Found at Managing Your Mental Health While Running a Startup | Future on 2022-04-21 10:45:20.

People in business and tech talk endlessly about fundraising, product-market fit, design thinking, the latest tech, management techniques, consumer trends – everything except the need to keep yourself in fighting shape. That’s crazy. Building and running a startup is exhausting. All founders need to create strategies to stay fit – mentally, emotionally, and physically. You don’t want your company to implode simply because you never carved out time to exercise or sleep.

Permalink: 20220420170648

Found at Scripting News: 12122005 on 2022-04-20 17:06:48.

The way to make money on the Internet is to send them away. Google proved this, in the age of portals that were trying to suck the eyeballs in and not let them go, Google took over by sending you off more efficiently than anyone else.

Permalink: 20220420163141

Found at The Early History Of Smalltalk on 2022-04-20 16:31:41.

Most ideas come from previous ideas. The sixties, particularly in the ARPA community, gave rise to a host of notions about “human-computer symbiosis” through interactive time-shared computers, graphics screens and pointing devices. Advanced computer languages were invented to simulate complex systems such as oil refineries and semi-intelligent behavior. The soon-to-follow paradigm shift of modern personal computing, overlapping window interfaces, and object-oriented design came from seeing the work of the sixties as something more than a “better old thing.”

Permalink: 20220420114315

Found at API Lifecycle Overview | Complete Guide | Akana on 2022-04-20 11:43:15.

The API lifecycle consists of three primary phases — create, control, and consume. In the create phase, you build and document your API. In the control phase, you apply security policies. And in the consume phase, you publish and monetize APIs.

Permalink: 20220410192049

Found at Keycloak on 2022-04-10 19:20:49.

Add authentication to applications and secure services with minimum effort.
No need to deal with storing users or authenticating users.

Keycloak provides user federation, strong authentication, user management, fine-grained authorization, and more.

Permalink: 20220406163937

Found at Semantic Linefeeds on 2022-04-06 16:39:37.

By starting a new line at the end of each sentence, and splitting sentences themselves at natural breaks between clauses, a text file becomes far easier to edit and version control. Text editors are very good at manipulating lines — so when each sentence is a contiguous block of lines, your editor suddenly becomes a very powerful mechanism for quickly rearranging clauses and ideas.

Permalink: 20220406152205

Found at All you need is links - by Gordon Brander - Subconscious on 2022-04-06 15:22:05.

It is my belief that this new ability to represent ideas in the fullness of their interconnections will lead to easier and better writing, easier and better learning, and a far greater ability to share and communicate the interconnections among tomorrows ideas and problems. Hypertext can represent all the interconnections an author can think of, and compound hypertext can represent all the interconnections many authors can think of, as we shall see.

Permalink: 20220404154310

Found at Product Management Playbook. A Beginner’s Guide to Digital Product… | by Jonathan Moed | Medium on 2022-04-04 15:43:10.

This guide covers the digital product development process from the time a product/feature idea is conceived until after that feature is launched. It breaks down each product development phase, including helpful tips, and suggested deliverables. It also covers the many roles of a product manager throughout this process, including: owner, champion, coordinator, communicator, documenter and more.

Permalink: 20220404154033

Found at HTTP Feeds | Asynchronous event streaming and data replication with plain HTTP APIs. on 2022-04-04 15:40:33.

HTTP feeds is a minimal specification for polling events over HTTP

Permalink: 20220330104338

Found at The TRS Drawbot: A Drawing Robot | Make: on 2022-03-30 10:43:38.

Almost any digital device with a headphone jack can be adapted to drive TRS Drawbot, but some will require more work than others, and some may be capable of producing higher-quality drawings.

Permalink: 20220330102747

Found at BrachioGraph 0.1 documentation on 2022-03-30 10:27:47.

A BrachioGraph can be built for about €15 in an hour or so, using a Raspberry Pi computer, hobby servo motors and household items. The BrachioGraph library is published on GitHub abd includes simple Python code to drive the plotter and vectorise bit-map images.

Permalink: 20220328170239

Found at Kongdeck: decK: Configuration management and drift detection for Kong on 2022-03-28 17:02:39.

decK provides declarative configuration and drift detection for Kong.

Permalink: 20220328170202

Found at King of our Kong: How we built a Configuration Management tool for Kong | by Eyal Brave | skai engineering blog | Mar, 2022 | Medium on 2022-03-28 17:02:02.

We want to manage our APIs the same way we handle almost every configuration in Skai — as code, which means that changes should be versioned, audited, and go through some chain of approval before being deployed to production. In other words, we wanted the API definitions to be just another Git repository.

Permalink: 20220325124859

Found at Should you make an open API? | FAIRTIQ on 2022-03-25 12:48:59.

Open APIs allow platform providers to leverage the creativity of an ever growing developer community to come up with innovative applications that add value to their core business without investing directly in the development of these.

Permalink: 20220325122842

Found at Platform Product Management - Silicon Valley Product Group on 2022-03-25 12:28:42.

One of the most difficult – but highest leverage – types of product management is to define successful platforms. By platforms, I am referring to foundation software that is used by application developers to create end-user solutions. Examples include operating systems (e.g. Windows, MacOS, Palm OS), operating environments (e.g. Java, Flash), Web services (e.g. Amazon’s or eBay’s integration API’s), and game developer platforms (e.g. XNA).

Permalink: 20220325122717

Found at Put Yourself in Your Customers Shoes When Developing APIs | Blog | Mastercard Developers on 2022-03-25 12:27:17.

The great thing about developing B2B API products is that it forces you to be customer centric as you build technology. However, if you distribute your services over an app, website, or device it’s possible to smooth over some of the bumps in your APIs with a slick user interface, leaving your team to maintain some level of undesirable API friction.

Permalink: 20220325122343

Found at APIs: A Strategy Guide [Book] on 2022-03-25 12:23:43.

Programmers used to be the only people excited about APIs, but now a growing number of companies see them as a hot new product channel. This concise guide describes the tremendous business potential of APIs, and demonstrates how you can use them to provide valuable services to clients, partners, or the public via the Internet. You’ll learn all the steps necessary for building a cohesive API business strategy from experts in the trenches.

Permalink: 20220325122044

Found at The API Product Mindset on 2022-03-25 12:20:44.

The API team manages APIs across their entire API lifecycle, including productization and, in some cases, monetization. API product managers are at the heart of managing, supporting, and optimizing the team’s workflows—they are the engine that keeps the process of new releases, iteration, and customer obsession running. This requires understanding and implementing best practices and recommendations across each stage of the API lifecycle.

Permalink: 20220323151032

Found at A Contrarian Take on Working Long Hours on 2022-03-23 15:10:32.

In my experience, long hours may actually be predictive of poor future results. It may be that the company is achieving great near-term results only because its team is working hard, and not because the company has the strong fundamentals that are required to achieve lasting success.

Related to: #great-resignation

Permalink: 20220315174645

Found at The Happiness Advantage – Shawn Achor on 2022-03-15 17:46:45.

We’ve been taught that if we work hard, we will be successful, and then we’ll be happy. If we can just find that great job, get a raise, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward: happiness fuels success, not the other way around.

Permalink: 20220315174500

Found at The ladders of wealth creation: a step-by-step roadmap to building wealth | Nathan Barry on 2022-03-15 17:45:00.

There’s a reliable progression that anyone can take to earn more and build wealth. In fact, I like to think of it as a series of ladders side by side. Each one can climb to different heights in both the quality of business and potential earnings.

Permalink: 20220310164828

Found at Bottleneck #02 on 2022-03-10 16:48:28.

Rushing to hit deadlines naturally means shortcuts will be taken. This will result in quality problems. They might be visible via user-facing bugs, outages, more customer service calls, delays or problematic releases. It might be covered up by developers firefighting or a customer service team appeasing customers, but this will soon become unsustainable.

Permalink: 20220310114319

Found at Trunk and Branches Model for Scaling Infrastructure Organizations | Irrational Exuberance on 2022-03-10 11:43:19.

Exchanging quality of service for investment bandwidth is a key tradeoff within an infrastructure organization, but it’s hardly the only one. Operating an infrastructure organization is maintaining a dynamic balance across many forces. You need to balance tech debt against morale. You need to balance iterating on the usability of your capabilities against delivering them before being crushed by an exponentially scaling problem tomorrow. You also need to balance your budget.

Permalink: 20220307112434

Found at One-man band - Wikipedia on 2022-03-07 11:24:34.

A one-man band is a musician who plays a number of instruments simultaneously using their hands, feet, limbs, and various mechanical or electronic contraptions. One-man bands also often sing while they perform.

Permalink: 20220302121923

Found at Stephen’s Web ~ How to Write Articles and Essays Quickly and Expertly ~ Stephen Downes on 2022-03-02 12:19:23.

Begin by writing - in your head, at least - your second paragraph (that would be the one you just read, above). Your second paragraph will tell people what your essay says. Some people write abstracts or executive summaries in order to accomplish this task. But you don’t need to do this. You are stating your entire essay or article in one paragraph. If you were writing a news article, you would call this paragraph the ’lede’. A person could read just the one paragraph and know what you had to say.

Permalink: 20220302102131

Found at Write plain text files | Derek Sivers on 2022-03-02 10:21:31.

I write almost everything important in my life: thoughts, plans, notes, diaries, correspondence, code, articles, and entire books.

They are my extended memory — my noted self — my organized thoughts. I refer to them often. I search them, update them, and learn from them. I convert them into HTML to make websites, or LaTeX to make books.

My written words are my most precious asset. They are also a history of my life. That’s why I only use plain text files. They are the most reliable, flexible, and long-lasting option.

Permalink: 20220301170152

Found at Olivetti Programma 101 on 2022-03-01 17:01:52.

The Olivetti Programma 101 is recognized as the world’s first desktop computer commercially produced. A complete computer with RAM (random access memory), CPU (central processing unit), display (only 2 lamps!), keyboard, printer and a “mass storage” device in one 65-pound compact and elegant cabinet. There is no need to connect to any external device, only to AC plug. This is not a simple calculator with some programming capability, it is a true computer that you can also use as a regular calculator. Of course the Programma 101 is quite far from modern PC, but it made possible to use a computer at home, office, school and many other places previously not reached by huge mainframes of that time.

Permalink: 20220301164641

Found at GNU Taler Documentation — GNU Taler 0.8.2 documentation on 2022-03-01 16:46:41.

We are building an anonymous, taxable payment system using modern cryptography. Customers will use traditional money transfers to send money to a digital Exchange and in return receive (anonymized) digital cash. Customers can use this digital cash to anonymously pay Merchants. Merchants can redeem the digital cash for traditional money at the digital Exchange. As Merchants are not anonymous, they can be taxed, enabling income or sales taxes to be withheld by the state while providing anonymity for Customers.

Permalink: 20220301095349

Found at Why You’re Not Doing Creative Work - Superorganizers - Every on 2022-03-01 09:53:49.

In creative work there are two phases: exploration and execution. In the exploration phase, you don’t know what the thing is going to be, you don’t have all of the information or ideas you want to have, you don’t even know if what you’re thinking about is important, and any little breeze in the wrong direction might blow you off course. In the execution phase, you are inspired, you know what the thing is, you know how to make it, it feels urgent; all you need to do is sit down and do the thing.

Permalink: 20220225105621

Found at I have read the API Terms of service : the biggest lie of the programmable web - APIscene on 2022-02-25 10:56:21.

API Terms of Service are a key element of today’s digital infrastructure. Indeed, everytime you use a Software-as-a-Service via its API, you now integrate the technical contract represented by the interface itself. But behind it, you are also accepting the business and legal contract represented by the rights allowed in copying or consuming that interface.

Permalink: 20220224174916

Found at Eden Blog | Looking to Improve Your Workplace Energy? Start Here on 2022-02-24 17:49:16.

People are naturally drawn to the right balance of calm versus high energy, so it might seem like the right energy balance just “happens.” But it’s more of a science than you might think. In fact, our research shows that three factors create energy: proximity, transparency, and cultural variants.

Permalink: 20220224120615

Found at Community Life Cycle on 2022-02-24 12:06:15.

The lessons offered by Usenet are relearned by just about every online forum, usually in the most painful manner possible. This sequence of events, repeated often enough to be called an archetype, runs as follows. With awareness, care, and enough willing, the forum can renew and refresh, cycling through the middle stages indefinitely.

Permalink: 20220223153822

Found at GitHub Advisory Database now open to community contributions | The GitHub Blog on 2022-02-23 15:38:22.

The GitHub Advisory Database is the largest database of vulnerabilities in software dependencies in the world. It is maintained by a dedicated team of full-time curators and powers the security audit experience for npm and NuGet, as well as GitHub’s own Dependabot alerts. By making it easier to contribute to and consume, we hope it will power even more experiences and will further help improve the security of all software.

Permalink: 20220223153730

Found at The Voltage Effect by John A. List: 9780593239483 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books on 2022-02-23 15:37:30.

In The Voltage Effect, List explains that scalable ideas share a common set of attributes, while any number of attributes can doom an unscalable idea. Drawing on his original research, as well as fascinating examples from the realms of business, policymaking, education, and public health, he identifies five measurable vital signs that a scalable idea must possess, and offers proven strategies for avoiding voltage drops and engineering voltage gains.

Permalink: 20220223153528

Found at Reality+ on 2022-02-23 15:35:28.

What is reality, anyway? How can we lead a good life? Is there a god? How do we know there’s an external world - and how do we know we’re not living in a computer simulation? In Reality+, Chalmers conducts a grand tour of philosophy, using cutting-edge technology to provide invigorating new answers to age-old questions.

Permalink: 20220222180853

Found at Claim-Check pattern - Cloud Design Patterns | Microsoft Docs on 2022-02-22 18:08:53.

Claim-check design pattern #

Split a large message into a claim check and a payload. Send the claim check to the messaging platform and store the payload to an external service. This pattern allows large messages to be processed, while protecting the message bus and the client from being overwhelmed or slowed down. This pattern also helps to reduce costs, as storage is usually cheaper than resource units used by the messaging platform.

The claim-check design pattern can be useful in the following scenarios:

• The request body payload you’re trying to send is too large for the receiving system, e.g., when using an AWS lambda function that has a maximum of 6 MB request body (see Lambda quotas).
• You don’t trust the caller and want to make sure that the information they’re sending is from a trusted source.

flowchart LR
C[Caller] --> |claim ID|R[Receiver]
C --> |payload|D[(Data store)]
D --> |payload|R

Permalink: 20220222095251

Found at Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness on 2022-02-22 09:52:51.

not only do happiness and optimism matter to employee performance, but they matter a lot, and both predict how well employees will do. Our military research, along with other behavioral science research spanning the past 40 years, highlights the competitive advantage that employee happiness offers businesses. There are some things about employee happiness that every business leader should know and be able to apply. And, as we emerge from a demoralizing global pandemic, we would all do well to take stock of how to influence the happiness and optimism of those around us in the workplace.

Permalink: 20220221095801

Found at Be anonymous on 2022-02-21 09:58:01.

Ultimately, anonymity comes down to one thing: Control. You should educate yourself on data privacy and make sure that you know what data you’re sharing and what is possibly out there. For example, did you know that when you send a photo on iMessage, the chances are that the location of that photo is in the metadata? All you have to do is save that photo and swipe up. Now, you have the exact geolocation, the capture time, and the camera type. Or that plenty of you have a profile on Whitepages with your phone number and address freely available?

Permalink: 20220218141854

Found at The Technium: The Big Here Quiz on 2022-02-18 14:18:54.

You live in the big here. Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined within a larger place, imbedded fractal-like into a whole system called a watershed, which is itself integrated with other watersheds into a tightly interdependent biome. At the ultimate level, your home is a cell in an organism called a planet. All these levels interconnect. What do you know about the dynamics of this larger system around you? Most of us are ignorant of this matrix. But it is the biggest interactive game there is. Hacking it is both fun and vital.

Permalink: 20220217100707

Found at Building for the 99% Developers | Future on 2022-02-17 10:07:07.

Accepting that your APIs are unlikely to converge on GraphQL will lead you to invest in more sustainable, multi-API protocol tooling. Recognizing that your org is probably not going to convert all of its legacy monolith to microservices will allow you to invest in tooling that does not neglect monitoring and debugging code in either the monolith or the microservices.

On the builder side, it’s conventional wisdom that you go hard after homogeneity for the “land” and embrace heterogeneity for the “expand.” Whether you plan for heterogeneity will greatly impact how quickly you can expand. Certain kinds of developer tools need to be custom-built for each new language or framework. For instance, a tool that provides insights only for GraphQL APIs may not easily expand to other kinds of APIs, especially because GraphQL contains more rich information than do REST or gRPC.

Permalink: 20220216221202

Found at Web Writing for Many Interest Levels | e-gineer by @nathanwallace on 2022-02-16 22:12:02.

Clear, usable content is easily created by deliberating writing for many different levels of reader interest. Every person has a certain level of interest in every piece of information. A writer should help each reader get their desired level of information as quickly as possible. Knowledge of and writing to these levels will increase the satisfaction of all readers.

Permalink: 20220216124649

Found at Lorinda Cherry | National Center for Women & Information Technology on 2022-02-16 12:46:49.

Cherry thrived in the collaborative and creative environment of Bell Labs, which encouraged programmers to imagine and execute projects that interested them. She worked on several influential mathematical tools, including a desk-calculator language (bc); TeX and eqn, both typesetting systems for publishing mathematical formulae; and a method of data compression based on trigram statistics, among others.

Permalink: 20220214193627

Found at Creating OpenAPI specifications with Jargon | by Alastair Parker | Feb, 2022 | Medium on 2022-02-14 19:36:27.

Jargon helps you create OpenAPI specifications from your domain models, and I’m going to show you just how quick and easy it is to do.

Permalink: 20220211151356

Found at Documentation System on 2022-02-11 15:13:56.

There is a secret that needs to be understood in order to write good software documentation: there isn’t one thing called documentation, there are four.

They are: tutorials, how-to guides, technical reference and explanation. They represent four different purposes or functions, and require four different approaches to their creation. Understanding the implications of this will help improve most documentation - often immensely.

Permalink: 20220209175336

Found at sbensu: APIs as ladders on 2022-02-09 17:53:36.

The hard part of an API is not to use it, but to learn it. After learning how the API works, typing out the commands is not hard. But when you first time you encounter an API, a million questions pop into your mind: What is this object for? Is there a parameter for that? Can the API do X? Learning requires effort, but the more the developer learns, the more problems they can solve. We can imagine the developers climbing a ladder where, for every step they take up the “learning ladder”3, the more problems they can solve.

Permalink: 20220209150110

Found at On being lost. Chapter 1 | by swardley | wardleymaps | Medium on 2022-02-09 15:01:10.

This is the story of my journey, from a bumbling and confused CEO lost in the headlights of change to having a vague idea of what I was doing. I say vague because I’m not going to make grand claims to the techniques that I discuss in this book. It is enough to say that I have found them useful over the last decade whether in finding opportunity, removing waste, helping to organise a team of people or determining the strategy for a company. Will they help you? That depends upon the context that you’re operating in but since the techniques don’t take long to learn then I’ll leave it up to the reader to discover whether they are helpful to them or not. Remember, all models are wrong but some are useful.

Permalink: 20220209094701

Found at Flow Architectures: The Future of Streaming and Event-Driven Integration - James Urquhart (VMWare) - YouTube on 2022-02-09 09:47:01.

Software development today is embracing events and streaming data, which optimizes not only how technology interacts but also how businesses integrate with one another to meet customer needs. This phenomenon, called flow, consists of patterns and standards that determine which activity and related data is communicated between parties over the internet.

Permalink: 20220208095203

Found at Goodbye HashiCorp. HashiCorp, you were the best thing that… | by Jana Iris (Boruta) | Jan, 2022 | Medium on 2022-02-08 09:52:03.

I was extremely comfortable but there comes a time when you realize you’re no longer growing and there’s not much else you can give a company or vice versa. At the end of the day, I am a builder who loves and thrives at the early stages.

Permalink: 20222718229

Found at Beyond REST and RPC on 2022-02-07 18:02:29.

CRUD is a typical data-centric interface. Of course it works. So does a Turing Machine or directly programming in Assembler. It is “Turing complete”: you can program anything in it. But that doesn’t imply the paradigm cannot be improved. What would happen if we would think in objects without a uniform interface? Behaviourally rich resources…

Permalink: 202227143437

Found at Managing people 🤯 | Andreas Klinger on 2022-02-07 14:34:37.

I believe almost all first-time founders burn out their first employees as they learn how to manage groups of people. If this advice helps avoid a few cases, it’s worth writing it down.

Permalink: 202226163944

Found at The Light and Dark Side of the API Economy on 2022-02-06 16:39:44.

The “API Economy” is a popular term among VC’s and tech media, but I find it curiously unappreciated by developers. I think this is partly because developers know this revolution by other names (“SaaS” or “Devtools”) and partly because the term is more popular among nontechnical audiences. This causes developers to severely underestimate the importance of the API Economy to their own careers.

Permalink: 20222419523

Found at From Manual to Contract Testing with KarateDSL and KarateIDE (I) | by Ivan Garcia Sainz-Aja | Feb, 2022 | Medium on 2022-02-04 19:05:23.

But in my personal experience, there is still an important gap between manual testing and testing automation. Unless you have a dedicated team of QA developers, if you expect your developer teams to write their own tests, mocks and contracts for the APIs they write, reality is that developers tend to use a different set of tools for manual testing and API exploration than the tools best suited for automation.

Permalink: 202224152418

Found at draft-wilde-registries-03 on 2022-02-04 15:24:18.

Registries for Internet and Web protocols fulfill a wide range of tasks, ranging from low-level networking aspects such as packet type identifiers, all the way up to application-level protocols and standards. This document summarizes some of the reasons of why, when, and how to use registries. It serves as an informative reference for specification writers considering whether to create and manage a registry, allowing them to better understand some of the issues associated with certain design and operational decisions.

Permalink: 202224105314

Found at Applying Event-Driven Architecture in Digital Transformation Projects | by Chathura Ekanayake | Medium on 2022-02-04 10:53:14.

We have to consider a wide range of use cases in digital transformation projects. Some of these use cases are short-term interactions such as a user or a system invoking a service and expecting an immediate response. An example would be to getting the list of products under a certain category in a shopping portal. However, there can be a significant number of use cases that require more complex interactions with multiple systems as we discuss below.

Permalink: 20222322940

Found at Introducing Wolvic | Igalia on 2022-02-03 22:09:40.

Today Igalia announces Wolvic, a new browser project with an initial focus of picking up where Firefox Reality leaves off.

XR (eXtended Reality, an umbrella term for Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and similar technologies) systems have advanced quite a bit recently, and experiencing them today is eye-opening. Mozilla invested a lot into R&D in XR in the late 2010s, and in late 2018 they released an experimental browser called Firefox Reality. It was a great entry into the XR field, helping establish what a browser in these devices really looks like, and figure out the unique challenges. Today we’re excited to take up this experiment and continue this work as a complete project.

Permalink: 202223184359

Found at building a modern home - Johnny Rodgers on 2022-02-03 18:43:59.

A lot of people dream of building a modern home. Or rather, a lot of people dream of living in a modern home. A place of their own, with the people they love, surrounded by functional beauty and considerate form.

Permalink: 202223182412

Found at A framework for building Open Graph images | The GitHub Blog on 2022-02-03 18:24:12.

We recently set about creating a framework and service for automatically generating social sharing images for repositories and other resources on GitHub.

Permalink: 202223115418

Found at How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century - Repeater Books on 2022-02-03 11:54:18.

Leaving behind its past associations with bureaucracy and state tyranny, and its lifeless and drab theoretical accounts, Čeika instead uses the works of Marx and Nietzsche to reconnect socialism with its human element, presenting it as something not only affecting, but created by living, breathing, suffering human individuals.

Permalink: 202222183823

Found at sinclairzx81typebox: JSON Schema Type Builder with Static Type Resolution for TypeScript on 2022-02-02 18:38:23.

TypeBox is a library that creates in-memory JSON Schema objects that can be statically inferred as TypeScript types. The schemas produced by this library are designed to match the static type checking rules of the TypeScript compiler. TypeBox allows one to create a unified type that can be both statically asserted by the TypeScript compiler and runtime asserted using standard JSON Schema validation.

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Found at mmWave radar, you won’t see it coming on 2022-02-02 17:31:36.

Radar works by transmitting electromagnetic waveforms and processing the returning waveforms as they are reflected back from the environment. Each reflected waveform, with its comparison to the original waveform, contains information that can be used to determine the size, location, direction, and speed of objects in the radar’s field of view.

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Found at RSS3 on 2022-02-02 16:25:27.

RSS3 is a next-generation feed standard that aims to support efficient and decentralized information distribution. More can be found on our blog & github. Learn about how we will create this fully decentralized network that is flexible, efficient, and extensible from our whitepaper.

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Found at The Importance of Story-Telling in Software Engineering | by Carlos Arguelles | Geek Culture | Medium on 2022-02-02 15:32:18.

The DNA of companies reflects, in so many ways, the DNA of founders. Jeff had a strong opinion about narratives, which he imprinted onto his senior leadership team, which in turn imprinted it onto front-end managers, which in turn imprinted it onto engineers. And so Jeff created a culture in which if you want to convey an idea to influence others, you write a 6-pager. With proper grammar, well-articulated sentences, and well thought-out points backed by data, that gets critiqued and improved round after round of reviews. None of this powerpoint-style presentation nonsense.

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Found at WorldAfterCapitalWorldAfterCapital: Technological progress has shifted scarcity for humanity. on 2022-02-01 18:26:13.

The World After Capital has two goals. The first is to establish that we are currently experiencing a third period of globally transformative, non-linear change. The key argument is that each time, the ‘space of the possible’ expands dramatically, the defining constraint for humanity shifts—meaning the allocation problem that most fundamentally needs to be solved in order to meet humanity’s needs changes. Specifically, the invention of agriculture shifted scarcity from food to land, and industrialization shifted scarcity from land to capital (which throughout The World After Capital refers to physical capital, such as machines and buildings, unless otherwise noted). Digital technology is now shifting scarcity from capital to attention.

Interesting book about capitalism and the three freedoms:

• Economic freedom: instituting a universal basic income.
• Informational freedom: broadening access to information and computation.
• Psychological freedom: practicing and encouraging mindfulness.

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Found at The unreasonable effectiveness of one-on-ones | benkuhn.net on 2022-02-01 10:54:07.

specialists have a lot of non-specialized problems. In one sense, this is so well known it’s become a cliché—the engineer who just wants to crank out code all day, the philosophy professor with their head in the clouds. But the cliché doesn’t really describe me or most engineers or philosophers I know, who are broad-minded enough to be happy thinking about things outside our assigned specialty. Even for us, though, we can often increase our impact a lot by improving our generalized effectiveness.

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Found at API Strategy Resources | MuleSoft on 2022-01-31 11:38:31.

When an organization strategically envisions APIs as engines for new products, new business channels, and new business models in ways that ultimately produce new revenue or other measurable value, that organization is said to be monetizing its APIs. In aggregate, the organizations around the world that directly or indirectly monetize their APIs form the basis of what the media often calls the “API economy.” As a subset of the total global economy, the API economy is annually responsible for the exchange of trillions of dollars.

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Found at American Workers Are Burned Out, and Bosses Are Struggling to Respond - WSJ on 2022-01-31 10:36:47.

The World Health Organization defines burnout as feelings of exhaustion and reduced effectiveness resulting from chronic workplace stress. Burnout had been mounting since before the pandemic. The percentage of American workers describing themselves as very often or always burned out rose from 23% in 2016 to 28% in 2019, where it remains today, according to Gallup surveys. By March 2020, though, rates of stress and worry among workers spiked to 60% and 58%, respectively, up from 46% and 38% before Covid, the surveys show.

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Found at The Right to Repair. A stupendous new book on a very urgent… | by Cory Doctorow | Jan, 2022 | Medium on 2022-01-30 17:07:54.

The Right to Repair movement has gained momentum over the past decade, cutting through questions of IP law, environmental survivability, consumer culture, tinkerers’ rights, consumer protection, fraud, information security and more.

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Found at 9 paths to Low-Code, some of which may actually work - The Architect Elevator on 2022-01-28 19:28:16.

Many folks are looking to reduce the amount of code we need to write, and rightly so. Some approaches are more promising than others, so as architects we are compelled to create list of possible approaches and evaluate their respective trade-offs.

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Found at anttiviljamiopenapi-backend: Build, Validate, Route, Authenticate and Mock using OpenAPI on 2022-01-28 18:45:01.

OpenAPI Backend is a Framework-agnostic middleware tool for building beautiful APIs with OpenAPI Specification.

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Found at Making the web better. With blocks! – Joel on Software on 2022-01-28 16:01:16.

Blocks can be highly structured, that is, they can have types. That means that they magically become machine-readable without screen scraping. For example, if you want to create an event block to represent an event on a calendar, you will be able to specify a schema that describes the event data type in a standard way. That way tools like calendars can instantly parse and understand web pages that contain your event block, reliably.

This reminds me of WCM where the dream was essentially the same.

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Found at Stepping Back from Speaking on 2022-01-27 11:39:24.

I am going to try to refuse almost every request to do talks. I’m not sure how well that will work out, but I’ve reached the point in my life where I’m lucky enough to be able to avoid things that make me miserable, and want to take advantage of my good fortune.

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Found at Inter-parameter dependencies in REST APIs | by Alberto Martín López | ISA Group | Medium on 2022-01-27 10:26:57.

REST APIs often include dependency constraints that restrict how two or more parameters can be combined to form valid API calls. These inter-parameter dependencies make it difficult to automatically interact with the services, since API specification languages offer little or no support for them. We carried out a study on 40 industrial APIs and found that 85% of them contain inter-parameter dependencies. More importantly, we classified all the dependencies found (over 600) into seven patterns, serving as the basis for future proposals for modeling and analyzing inter-parameter dependencies automatically.

Permalink: 202212618193

Found at Brian Eno: Another Green World | PORT Magazine on 2022-01-26 18:19:03.

what does art do for us? Is there something special that artists can offer to this movement other than handing over their money? Something that uses our skills and sensitivities? The obvious and probably not the best solution is propaganda.

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Found at Mirror: Create and connect your world on web3 on 2022-01-26 16:49:45.

The essential web3 toolkit for sharing and funding anything. From writing about your latest idea, to building a home for the next big DAO.

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Found at Machine readable specifications at scale – Alastair Reid – Researcher at Intel on 2022-01-26 12:21:28.

In many ways, having a high quality, authoritative, human readable, machine readable specification that is used by all major users of existing documentation is a no-brainer. It takes work to set it up and to meet everybody’s requirements and it takes some coordination effort to maintain it in a usable state for all users but, if you can do that, it saves a lot of effort, improves coordination and communication both within the company and outside and it leads to higher quality products.

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Found at Redis vs Kafka vs RabbitMQ. When using asynchronous communication… | by Mertcan Arguç | Dec, 2021 | Dev Genius on 2022-01-26 12:16:39.

When using asynchronous communication for Microservices, it is common to use a message broker. A broker ensures communication between different microservices is reliable and stable, that the messages are managed and monitored within the system and that messages don’t get lost. There are a few message brokers you can choose from, varying in scale and data capabilities. This blog post will compare the three most popular brokers: RabbitMQ, Kafka and Redis.

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Found at Project Gemini FAQ on 2022-01-26 11:33:30.

Gemini is a new application-level internet protocol for the distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration for serving a lightweight hypertext format which facilitates linking between files. You may think of Gemini as “the web, stripped right back to its essence” or as “Gopher, souped up and modernised just a little”, depending upon your perspective (the latter view is probably more accurate).

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Found at The Old Internet Shows Signs of Quietly Coming Back on 2022-01-26 11:27:39.

Some people use the term “Web 3.0” to refer only to decentralized blockchain-based networks without considering that all personal websites have essentially the same goals, be they on the regular Internet or on the new blockchain networks. Those who use the term “web 3.0” seem to have forgotten that self-hosted personal websites that run on home servers and are accessible over the regular Internet are inherently decentralized. Unfortunately, despite common goals, some on today’s old Internet are hostile to blockchain technology. I am not sure why. Perhaps this is because we seem to be hard-wired to focus on the new and ignore the old, and owners of personal websites on the regular Internet feel ignored. Perhaps they feel the presence of the new blockchain technology only helps to obscure the fact that personal websites on the regular Internet are likely to become a larger more important part of the Internet of the Future–regardless of whether we call it the “old Internet”, “Web 3.0”, or something else. Perhaps someone should come up with a more descriptive name. Maybe a name like “The Cyberfreedom Network” would attract more attention.

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Found at The Great Resignation looks more like The Great Renegotiation : Planet Money : NPR on 2022-01-25 18:14:49.

Americans are not en masse rejecting consumerism, moving off the grid, and living off the land. Most still need money. Some of those quitting are older workers deciding to retire early in large part because their finances have been buoyed by surging stock and housing markets. Others are secondary earners who have stayed home because they have had to take care of kids while schools have closed due to COVID-19 — or because, more simply, working face to face during a pandemic sucks.

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Found at AVC - Musings of a VC in NYC on 2022-01-25 12:58:32.

There are three primary reasons why Covid, as we have known it, is coming to an end in the wealthier parts of the world. First, we have less severe variants now. Second, most people in the developed world who want to be vaccinated have been vaccinated, many multiple times. And third, we have antivirals that can protect those who get very sick.

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Found at API Evolution for RESTHTTP APIs on 2022-01-24 20:42:57.

API evolution is making a comeback these days with GraphQL and gRPC advocates shouting about it. Whatever API paradigm or implementation you subscribe to, evolution is available to you. REST advocates have been recommending API evolution for decades, but in the past I failed to understand how exactly to handle evolution.

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Found at Buy Things, Not Experiences — harold lee on 2022-01-24 15:46:40.

I would, if anything, reverse the maxim: “Buy things, not experiences!” Sure, the Lambo might still be a waste of money, but thoughtfully chosen material goods can enable new activities can enrich your life, extend your capabilities, and deepen your understanding of the world. And if ever more affordable material goods can build up a measure of independence from the ever more expensive services that actually consume people’s income, that would be a trade to be proud of.

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Found at Web3 101 | Fintech Inside Edition #51 - 23rd Jan, 2022 on 2022-01-24 12:33:29.

Web3 is in many ways a branding makeover for all the philosophical underpinnings and technical promise of blockchains and crypto assets. It is shorthand for the next iteration of the Internet, one which offers the potential (and not the guarantee) of a more egalitarian future for Internet users.

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Found at 2021 State of the API Report | Brought to You by Postman on 2022-01-24 10:29:25.

This year’s State of the API report covers the largest and most comprehensive survey on APIs, ever. More than 28,000 developers and API professionals shared their thoughts on a range of topics, including their organizations’ development priorities, how they get their work done, and where they see the industry going. We combined this data with data we’ve observed on the Postman API Platform to build a robust picture of the current state—and the future—of APIs.

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Found at The Problem With NFTs - YouTube on 2022-01-24 10:11:50.

If someone pitches you on a “great” Web3 project, ask them if it requires buying or selling crypto to do what they say it does.

Very comprehensive video about web3, NFTs, and crypto in general.

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Found at Reflecting on a Career in Product Management on 2022-01-23 09:24:52.

There was no grandeur to product management in those days. The glory was in engineering, and moving out of engineering was viewed as a career-limiting decision. There was engineering and “business,” which is what we called everyone who wasn’t an engineer in those days.

Times have certainly changed. Product management is now an aspiration for thousands of people just starting their careers. Everyone, it seems, wants to be a PM. And that’s terrific. But with popularity comes noise, and with the noise comes terrible advice, and with the lousy advice come the promises of easy shortcuts and snake oil.

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Found at tkelloggdura: You shouldn’t ever lose your work if you’re using Git on 2022-01-22 19:54:55.

Dura is a background process that watches your Git repositories and commits your uncommitted changes without impacting HEAD, the current branch, or the Git index (staged files). If you ever get into an “oh snap!” situation where you think you just lost days of work, checkout a dura branch and recover.

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Found at Introduction (fswatch 1.16.0) on 2022-01-22 19:50:42.

fswatch is a file change monitor that receives notifications when the contents of the specified files or directories are modified. fswatch interacts with the operating system using a monitor.

You can use fswatch to actively monitor a folder and push any changes to GitHub automatically.

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Found at Hands-On With Spectral: Using API Linting for Better API Design and API Governance - YouTube on 2022-01-22 19:34:25.

In this hands-on demonstration, Axway Catalyst Chris Wood walk us through seven steps of how Spectral can be used to improve API management. All source code for the demos is openly available on GitHub.

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Found at Let The Wild Rumpus Begin on 2022-01-22 19:30:38.

What nobody seems to discuss is that higher-priced assets are simply worse than lower-priced ones. When farms or commercial forests, for example, double in price so that yields fall from 6% to 3% (as they actually have) you feel richer. But your wealth compounds much more slowly at bubble pricing, and your income also falls behind. Some deal! And if you’re young, waiting to buy your first house or your first portfolio, it is too expensive to get even started. You can only envy your parents and feel badly treated, which you have been.

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Found at tkelloggdura: You shouldn’t ever lose your work if you’re using Git on 2022-01-21 23:19:13.

Dura is a background process that watches your Git repositories and commits your uncommitted changes without impacting HEAD, the current branch, or the Git index (staged files). If you ever get into an “oh snap!” situation where you think you just lost days of work, checkout a dura branch and recover.

Interesting approach to keeping your git repository always up-to-date.

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Found at The Memex Method. When your commonplace book is a public… | by Cory Doctorow | Medium on 2022-01-21 23:00:08.

There’s another way that blogging makes my writing better: writing every day makes it easier to write every day. When I was a baby writer, I thought the injunction to “write every day” was purely aspirational, like “do an hour’s aerobic exercise” or “eat five helpings of vegetables.” I deeply regret the years in which I waited for inspiration to strike before writing (as I regret the years when I didn’t get adequate exercise or nutrition) because of all the practice I missed and the habits I waited too long to develop.