Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
After spending quite a few years working with services, and, more recently, API gateways, I've become intimately familiar with the desire to add layers and layers of middleware. When a service is initially designed it focuses only on pure functionality - each endpoint offering a unique business…
For the last two years I've been working in the role of an API developer at Shutterstock. This was, initially, a career move that seemed to be both simple and stable. After all, working on an API is just making sure some lightweight application spit out JSON to match an interface, right? Wrong. The…
Swagger spec is an awesome tool for describing APIs in a standardized way, allowing programs to understand and interpret them. It is a set of files (often just one) written in JSON or yaml that defines the routes, parameters, responses, and metadata of an API. After a spec has been written it can be…
Guzzle is a wildly popular PHP client that makes it simple to perform HTTP requests. The latest version, Guzzle v6, implements PSR-7 standards when handling requests and responses. By enforcing this standard HTTP messaging protocol it is now easier to have inter operable exchanges between packages,…
Sometime last year I got to tackle an interesting project at work. We use customer.io for a lot of front-end tracking for our users, even going as far as using their bucketing and email communication for much of our targeted marketing. While we had a great system in place for talking through…
One of the traditions at Shutterstock is a quarterly Coderage or Hackathon, when all the developers group up and build something outside of planned workflows. These projects could vary from quick prototypes of internal service mashups to large-scale refactors of problematic areas in the codebase.…