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I realize I've ranted about this before, but...

Fuck APIs.

First the fact that external services can throw back 500 errors or timeouts when their maintainer did a drunk deploy (but you properly handled that using caching, workers, retry handlers, etc, right? RIGHT?)...

Then the fact that they all speak a variety of languages and dialects (Oh fuck why does that endpoint return a JSON object with int keys instead of a simple array... wait the params are separated with pipe characters? And the other endpoint uses SOAP? Fuck I need to write another wrapper class around the client...)

But the worst thing: It makes developers live in this happy imaginary universe where "malicious" is not a word.

"I found this cloud service which checks our code style" — hmm ok, they seem trustworthy. Hope they don't sell our code, but whatever.

"And look at this thing, it automatically makes database backups, just have to connect to it to DigitalOcean" — uhhh wait...

"And I just built this API client which sends these forms to be OCR processed" — Fuck... stop it... there are bank accounts numbers on those forms... Where's that API even located? What company?

* read their privacy policy *

"We can not guarantee the safety of your personal data, use at your own risk [...] we are located in Russia".

I fucking hate these millennial devs who literally fail to get their head out of the cloud.

Somehow they think it's easier to write all these NodeJS handlers and layers around some API, which probably just calls ImageMagick + Tesseract on the other side.

If I wasn't so fucking exhausted, I'd chop of their heads... but they're like hydra, you seal one privacy breach and another is waiting to be merged, these kids just keep spewing their crap into easy packages, they keep deploying shitty heroku apps... ugh.

😖

Comments
  • 7
  • 14
    I love your rants. 🤗
  • 6
    Oh yaaaaa I feel the same working in this project it is not because if what you said but:
    1. Required fields change randomly in a simple registration form without being notified about it
    2. Dev server suddenly gets deleted and another one is created and I only know when I hit run on my tests
    3. Inside the array property x of object y is Boolean but if you call that object from the endpoint it gives you property x as 0 &1 IN STRING FORMAT, so you double check if bool or string and then convert ....
    4. The list goes on and I'm too tired to type :/
  • 4
    @Condor I can relate.

    What @AlexDeLarge said.

    @ryanmhoffman me too.
  • 2
    @sslPoodle I agree... I wud also like people like the OP to present some do’s and don’ts on a website or something so the newbie devs can learn from it and not make those mistakes...
    Ofc only if u have time that is 🤗🤗
  • 4
    @sslPoodle @Electrux

    1. Consider implementing functionality yourself as a business. I often hear arguments about not reinventing wheels, but trusting an external API concerning stability and privacy is not worth it, if that external API does something fairly simple such as resizing an image.

    2. Same goes for the whole services and tools suite a company uses. Don't trust every cloud service blindly with company data just because their website is pretty.

    3. When using cloud offerings seem like a better option than selfhosted solutions, check reviews and news items about them, actually read their privacy policy, check the country where they're based, chamber of commerce registration, etc.

    4. Document which data leaves the company, to which external servers. Make sure there is no data from individual end users in there (names, addresses, bank accounts, SSNs, etc). Under GDPR you must have a damn good reason to share this, and have explicit consent, or face very high fines
  • 1
    @bittersweet
    Wow!!
    Good to know thanks a lot 😊😊🙌🏻🙌🏻
  • 2
    @bittersweet I wish I had a boss/colleague like you, in my case it is just send everything and we will clean it up later, and later never comes and privacy is never taken care of and life is fucked up.

    Thank you for showing me there is still hope left :)
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