I wrote my award-winning* thought process up in a post on the actual ludum dare crowd blog thing, and will maybe link to everything I write there from here. That may not be much. Look forward to a timelapse video of my failure, though! And maybe a half-playable game!
* not a fact
Recently, I had a reminder that overall, a lot of things just don’t get done.
It’s rarely a conspicuous lack of a thing getting done that reminds me — instead, it’s the surprised, positive reaction from people when things do get done. We simply couldn’t muster such shock and joy if most things just… got finished.
It’s easy to assume that other people get stuff done. Certainly people finish stuff at work, do taxes, and fill out medical forms. But outside that — keeping up with friends and colleagues, participating in clubs and sports, or working on side projects — it’s tough to tell. You see each of your own failures, and mostly hear about other people’s successes. So it’s easy to imagine that you’re worse than average at doing stuff.
But we all forget to send emails and to look things up. We all fail to keep in touch with friends who we meant to stay connected with. It may seem too late to send a greeting, or to finish something you said you’d get done. It may seem like you just haven’t done enough yet. At any rate, it would feel embarrassing to send it now.
Fortunately though, these rare reminders about how bad we all are can teach us a powerful lesson, which is that late, half-baked crap is more than people expect.
The easy way out of these situations is to not do anything. Just put it down and don’t think about it. As long as it’s not work, taxes, or health stuff, the problem will usually just go away. So that’s what most of us do. Nothing. And that’s most of us expect, too. Nothing.
But nothing is only what it looks like. Most people actually do get started. We do take the first steps toward finishing stuff. Maybe just a bit late, or something makes us put it aside incomplete. Then life happens, time passes, and embarrassment keeps us silent. So it looks like nothing got done at all.
So no one expects anything of you. Which is great news!
Because you probably have a pile of late, half-baked crap lying around. Stuff you meant to do a long time ago, or that just needs a little more work. You occasionally remember it and cringe, thinking it’s too late now. False. It’s time to send it off — just apologise if you’ve gotta. Set aside the prideful embarrassment for a moment and think about this:
If it’s so late that you feel embarrassed about sending it, the person has probably forgotten about it, or moved on. They’re not expecting anything now, so this is unexpected gravy. You may just make their day. They won’t be angry that you’re late, or didn’t do enough, they’ll be glad that you did something. The vast majority of people can’t manage that. Your late, half-baked crap may even amaze them.
No matter what, it’s better than nothing.
Let’s start with the following: this is a post about a part of REST called HATEOAS, and why your API probably doesn’t need it. If you don’t know what that is — especially if you also feel that you do know what REST is — or, you think your API should implement HATEOAS, this post lies in a subset of {informative, angering, boring} for you.
I ran across Zapier’s When REST Gets Messy post, and among other good advice, it had a buried gem regarding HATEOAS:
I’m also not convinced that it makes sense for an internally consumed API.
…why is this a gem? And what on earth is this HATEOAS acronym we’ve seen 3 times in two paragraphs? Read on to find out.
HATEOAS (pronounce it however you like — I use both hate-ee-ohs and hate-yo-ass) is one requirement of a RESTful API. The requirement is that a RESTful API should use Hypertext As The Engine Of Application State.
Acronym city. So what on earth does that mean?
Roughly this: each response from your API should include a representation of all validly reachable states. Probably as a set of URLs describing what can be done next — kinda like a dynamic site map, but in an API.
Most people don’t know what HATEOAS is. Many have never even heard of it — including a surprising number of people who claim to have written RESTful APIs. This is because it’s a bit of a complex topic, and can only be addressed after getting people to grok some more basic requirements of REST. Also… there’s no standard way to implement it — but I’ll cover that nit in a bit.
Most people learn about REST by reading a tutorial or article, and unfortunately end up with the following understanding of it:
Those are steps on the way to a RESTful web API, but it also needs some HATEOAS sauce. Whether HATEOAS is left out of articles or people just stop reading before getting to it is unknown to me, but they frequently seem to miss it.
The two points above roughly define a resource oriented API. And you know what? That is good enough for most applications.
Once again, it isn’t REST, but it’s good enough for most APIs. Writers of APIs often just desire a way to organize their data and their interaction with it. A resource-oriented API provides exactly that. They’re also using HTTP verbs, so web crawlers can’t mess up their data with errant GET requests. I think this is a big win.
But… shouldn’t they do all of REST? What exactly would HATEOAS gain them? (let alone that there are other components to REST) Here is my thesis: HATEOAS is useful for solving a problem that is more complex than what most API implementers have to deal with.
As I said before, HATEOAS basically gives a list of all the links available to you. If you’re writing both an API and its client or client library, you really don’t need that. You already know what links are available. If they change, it’s you who changed them, and you who will make corresponding changes in your API-consuming clients. Most of us are not writing APIs for public consumption, and if we are, we’re writing fairly stable, versioned APIs that are typically accessed via libraries, by purpose-written integrations or apps.
Now we see why that sentence from When REST Gets Messy is a gem. An internally consumed API is a simpler problem than the one HATEOAS solves.
HATEOAS lets you do something truly cool: with it, you could write a client that has no knowledge of an API aside from how to read its site-map. A business with several teams that all make APIs (internal or external) might need this, because any client might have to speak to many different APIs. The business has a choice:
The last choice is obviously a very good idea; it’s like a meta-API. Everyone agrees on one way for the APIs to describe themselves, and then one client library can know how to parse that description format.
It’s now okay for the APIs to be totally unstable. Clients are not constantly needing updates, because they aren’t tied to a particular data representation or quirk. The HATEOAS representation gives enough information for the client to figure out what it needs. Google or Yahoo or Amazon are the type of place for whom this is a real problem.
It’s sort of the magical dream that one day, all APIs everywhere will be self-describing, and all clients will know how to parse the descriptions and figure everything out for themselves. Then we can stop being as concerned about API stability and versions, and writing clients or fixing API bugs would conceivably be way easier.
Unfortunately, HATEOAS has some problems. The worst of which is that you have to come up with your own way to describe your API, because REST just tells you to do it, not how to do it. To my knowledge, there’s no known good way to describe all possible APIs yet — so you’re on the hook for that.
Then the smaller problem: adding in self-descriptions takes extra work. Just writing a client that parses them can be a lot of work.
There are some attempts at making a standard, but we’ve all seen that xkcd. If one takes off, people could be writing general purpose API consumers, and that would be cool. For now though, there are a million ways to describe your API, so put yourself in the shoes of someone writing a client. You have the following choice:
The latter option is much easier up-front. So consumers rarely use HATEOAS, even if it’s present. Now, put yourself back in the shoes of an API writer: is it worth spending the time to a) come up with a description format and then b) implement it? In practice, most API writers end up in one of the following situations:
And some rare organizations fall into this category:
5. Spend extra time to write a beautiful, fully RESTful API that you and your
customers use, because your constellation of APIs are constantly in flux.
It’s a fun mental game to play, and it can be smart to include links in your API responses to ease a client’s work. Fully representing your application’s state in every response is almost always overkill — so until we have solved how to do HATEOAS everywhere, a resource-oriented API is good enough.
I don’t really use mailing lists, but I have often seen references to their utility.
This is a bit of an exercise in trialling a research methodology out. I’m interested in making a program to help me do this, but I’m going to try just writing all the stuff I think I want to save in a database down in a blogpost, and see how cumbersome it is. I already do a lot of this in my head, but I sometimes decide not to bother, because no one can see what I have only done in my head.
Hmmmm. Neat. So, in flushing out the things I know and the things I think I need to figure out, an important truth has been discovered: I already know how to use mailing lists sufficiently well. I mean, goodness, I use them at work every day. For some reason, mailing lists in the wild just seemed like a different beast to me.
My questions are more about “how to be a power user of these” than “how do they even work” — but even there, I think I have a fair grasp. For example:
I do not know how to manage them or what I don’t know.
This shift in ‘what I want to know’ suggests I should perhaps issue a new google query, ‘how to manage mailing lists’ rather than ‘how to use mailing lists’. A google search for that shows why it is a bad idea: most people who search that are looking to manage a list, not manage their interaction with several lists. After a few more trial queries, I landed on the simple “reading mailing lists”, which gave me links 2A and 2B.
2B is a little worthless and short, but 2A looks like the kind of goldmine I was looking for, and it’s also telling me something I’d wondered: a specific client, like mutt, may be my best option.
I think I can’t actually know super practically what managing them entails until I start trying, so maybe I should just subscribe to a bunch and see how it goes. If gmail fails me, and I can’t find anything out there, I’ll can build something that solves my problems. The suggestion of trying mutt is likely where I’ll turn to first once I run into a problem, but it might be nice not to have to boot a vm to read mail (I use windows on my home laptop.)
Thanks for bearing with me through this slightly silly experiment.
Just looking at aaronsw’s stuff. “If I get hit by a truck…”, from 2002, is a neat read. I don’t have much comment (I certainly don’t have plans for what should be done in the event that I am hit by a truck, however proverbial) — I just kind of wanted to say somewhere, to somebody (even you, Dear Reader) that it’s upsetting to me that at the bottom of that page the footer says “I’m not dead yet!”.
The guy’s dead. And he directly asked that the page’s footer be updated to note what’s happened if something happened. That’s not the kind of thing that you don’t do.
Maybe no one has permissions? I hope that’s it.
Update: I reached out to the person listed as being responsible, and he was extremely accommodating to some random internet passerby asking about a fairly personal thing. His response made sense — estates are complex things to deal with, and there are often both a lot of things to do and a lot of things keeping them from being done.