Phil Sturgeon

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Tech

As a techie I write about pragmatic API design & development, systems architecture, and am increasingly trying to use tech and the tech community to help unf**k the planet.

A Happy Compromise Between Customization and Cacheability

With endpoint-based APIs (REST, RESTish, SOAP, RPC, AJAX-ish junk, etc.) you get to choose if you want increased likelihood of network cache hits, or the ability to slim down the response. The two goals are mutually exclusive. Slimming responses can be achieved with concepts like sparse fieldsets (tl:dr; send

Chasing the Perfect API Specification Workflow

Documentation is a nice thing to have, but it is often treated as optional or superfluous, especially in teams where the clients and servers are managed by the same people. Here the code is considered the contract, so why define it again in documentation? Certainly, with all the tooling around,

You Might Not Need GraphQL

Do you like the look of GraphQL, but have an existing REST/RPC API that you don't want to ditch? GraphQL definitely has some cool features and benefits. Those are all bundled in one package, with a nice marketing site, documenting how to do all the cool stuff,

GraphQL vs REST: Caching

Recently I wrote GraphQL vs REST: Overview, giving a hype-free outline of the differences between REST and GraphQL. One section that would not have fit into that already lengthy article was caching, so I thought I'd fire that out next. Comparing how caching is used for the two

GraphQL vs REST: Overview

A few months back I wrote a comparison between RPC and REST for Smashing Magazine, and now I want to talk about the differences between REST and GraphQL: the new kid on the block. GraphQL is incorrectly considered by some to be a "replacement" to REST. GraphQL is

Tips on Sidekiq Queues

Sidekiq is great. It's a really handy way to take slow stuff that your application is doing like uploading images or sending emails, and get them out of the web request. Users don't want to sit around waiting for that stuff to happen most of the

Codes of Conduct: Maybe They're Not So Bad?

I've written a few articles about Code of Conducts, which are a hotly debated version of the Anti-Harassment policy you almost certainly signed at any job you've held since delivering newspapers. Before I grappled the subject head-on, I wanted to clear a few related points out