How Not to Write an API — On Coding — Medium
One common pattern I see is that most APIs have a REST or NVP based API at it’s core. Then they generally have some method if signing a request. Following that is more than 1 way to send different types of data, between JSON, XML or a file stream. But one pattern always puzzles me. The documentation on these core APIs are usually lacking. Instead, they develop SDKs for specific languages. Now, on the surface, that make sense. Let’s make it easy to use our API in your language of choice. But that idea is flawed.
Programming Modern Systems Like It Was 1984
Imagine you were a professional programmer in 1984, then you went to sleep and woke up 30 years later. How would your development habits be changed by the ubiquitous, consumer-level supercomputers of 2014?
Dementia, Alzheimers and the Wanderers
Six in 10 people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia become lost at least once. Why do they wander, and how do we stop them?
[48924] Please Offer An Excel Export Option
Data is ultimately meant to be consumed by people. This may come as a shock, but most people are not computer programmers. They are not going to read your CSV with Python and process it with Pandas or Numpy. They are not versed in the libcsv API, nor do they possess ambitions to convert your CSV to JSON in order to build a web mashup. Of the grammar of graphics, they know nothing. In all likelihood they are going to open your CSV file in Microsoft Excel 2004, or if you're lucky Microsoft Excel 2007, and they are going to spend hours building pixelated pie charts, bar charts, and 3D line graphs. You might not use Excel to analyze data, but they almost certainly will. So why not accommodate their intentions as well as you can? Isn't programming fundamentally about helping users achieve their goals?
Revealed: victims of UK’s cold war torture camp | UK news | The Guardian
A few were starved or beaten to death, while British soldiers are alleged to have tortured some victims with thumb screws and shin screws recovered from a gestapo prison. The men in the photographs are not Nazis, however, but suspected communists, arrested in 1946 because they were thought to support the Soviet Union, an ally 18 months earlier.