At a certain client, was asked to help them with an "intermediary" solution to stopgap a license renewal on their HR recruiting system.

This is something I was very familiar with, so no big. Did some requirements gathering, told them we could knock it out in 6 weeks.

We start the project, no problems, everything is fine until about 2.5 weeks in. At this point, someone demands that we engage with the testing team early. It grates a little as this client had the typical Indian outsourcing mega-corp pointey-clickey shit show "testing" (automation? Did you mean '10 additional testers?') you get at companies who put business people in charge of technology, but I couldn't really argue with it.

So we're progressing along and the project manager decides now is a great time to bugger the fuck off to India for 3 months, so she's totally gone. This is the point it goes off the rails. Without a PM to control the scope, the "lead tester," we'll call her Shrilldesi, proceeds to sit in a room and start trying to control the design of the system. Rather than testing anything in the specification, she just looked at the existing full HRIS recruiting system they were using and starts submitting bugs for missing features. The fuckwit serfs they'd assigned from HR to oversee this process just allowed it to happen totally losing focus on the fact this was an interim solution to hold them over for 6 months and avoid a contract renewal.

I get real passive aggressive at this point and refuse to deliver anything outside the original scope. We negotiate and end up with about 150% scope bloat and a now untenable timeline that we delivered about 2 weeks late, but in the end that absolute whore made my life a living hell for the duration of the project. She then got the recognition at the project release for her "excellent work," no mention of the people who actually did the work.

Tl;Dr people suck and if you value your sanity, you'll avoid companies that say things like, "we're not in the technology business" as an excuse to have shitty, ignorant staff.

For a side project I identified the need for RPC (originally over Websocket but can be extended to WebRTC/DTLS) that supports

- JSON-serializable values
- Promises
- MessagePorts (including shortcut detection for ports that are passed back on a different route)
- async functions

I have ideas for all of these and this is an exciting prospective library, but it's also major scope bloat that will prevent me from ever finishing the project that depends on it.

Would you be interested in such a library if it ever got built?

Consider an API that uses the HTTP path to represent position in a tree that literally represents a file tree with minimal constraints, and GET/PUT/DELETE methods to read, write and destroy the nodes. How would you encode read/write operations to per-node metadata? The kinds of metadata are static and around 4, so inventing HTTP verbs for each of them is infeasible but filtering is not necessary.

Options considered so far:
- toplevel resources alongside a namespaced /data such as /acl, /lock
- magic keywords to the Range header (this is apparently compliant)
- mimetypes such as text/plain+acl
- SETPROP / PROP methods in the spirit of WebDAV
- headers (I worry this may become an immitigable bottleneck really fast)

I'm looking for any kind of suggestion or insight, not perfect answers.

I read the WebDAV specification and I won't even suggest that I'm trying to align with it, the only protocol I'd seen in the past with comparable scope bloat is WebRTC.