I recently wrote about a trend in the frontend world where people are working to make the API disappear. This week, a new framework called Service Weaver popped up that strives for this just from a microservices perspective. There’s a Google blog post that goes into detail bout Service Weaver: Service Weaver allows you to write your application as a modular monolith and deploy it as a set of microservices.

It’s always interested me how GraphQL does all it does without making you think about the HTTP details. You get to focus in on your data and behavior and forget about all the standards and best practices around URLs, HTTP methods, and status codes. Frontend GraphQL tooling takes it further, allowing you to think about data and behavior at the component level rather than API level—the tooling figures out how to optimize the queries to the server across all the components.

My latest book is called The Language-Oriented Approach to API Development, and you can read it online for free now. It’s about a different way to think about the API development lifecycle. In this approach, people create their own language for the way they talk about APIs and capture that language in a DSL. This stands in contrast to authoring API designs in OpenAPI and using linting tools to ensure the design meets the API standards for an organization or team.

Taking a ham radio course I’ve always loved the pictures of people sitting at a desk with a wall of their ham radio equipment in front of them. They look so cool, like they’re helping someone land a plane or giving guidance to astronauts as they navigate space. Search for “ham radio station” on your favorite search site and you’ll get hundreds of pictures like this of people with their gear.

I don’t think these count as weeknotes anymore. There’s been a lot going on. The biggest change for me is that I’ve taken a full time job that I start March 28th (tomorrow). I wasn’t planning on stopping my solo work, but a few opportunities popped up that I decided to consider. It wasn’t an easy choice to stop working for myself, and it was tough to pick between a few great opportunities, but I’m excited about what’s to come.

I’ve started taking a pottery class. It’s a much-welcomed escape from my digital working life that I don’t normally take. I read and write, but I don’t do much with my hands like this. I recently discovered Pandoc as a great tool for building nice-looking PDFs from Markdown. Murderville was ridiculous. I’m reading ‌How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur. I’m also trying to finish Dune.

Hyrum’s Law says: With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody. But by itself it’s not all that helpful to me. It’s like saying, “with a sufficient number of people, a room will be overcrowded.” Is that according to Fire Marshalls? Introverts? How big is the room?

This is my first week back to writing weeknotes after taking a long time off. We’ve been locking ourselves down with the recent surges. Our area has been breaking daily numbers regularly and filling up our hospital with enough people to put it into crisis mode. But not everyone feels the crisis as our local schools removed the requirement for students to quarantine after exposure. I took off a few weeks at the end of the year that started with a nasty tornado that ripped through our area.

I’m writing this from a coffee shop. It’s the first time I’ve sat inside one since the pandemic started. I spent several mornings at a coffee shop writing Morning Pages before the pandemic. When you go regularly like that, you get to know the regulars and be known as a regular. They stop asking your name when you place your order. You get to know the staff and the regulars like it’s a little community.

It’s fall now. We have about 10-15 huge trees that are pouring out a steady stream of leaves into our yard. The leaves are beautiful to look at while they’re changing colors and still in the trees. But when they come down, they turn into a sloppy mess. I’ve been coding a lot lately, for experimenting, for building tools for work, and for my own tinkering. Friday, I wrote a Python library for fun called zzip that’s useful for traversing over data and making immutable changes.