Archive for August, 2009

Inspired startup

This is a blog site by Andy, a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. I found entries by him very inspirational. I often read his posts. Here’s the link.

2009
08/11
CATEGORY
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RESTful web services

Many developers heard/use/implement/develop RESTful web services daily basis including myself. It seems likely that we all know what it is and how it works. However, if we ask ourselves why we are using it, what would be your answer?

My answer to this question is this:

To make *services* more sense.

We all know that RESTful web services utilizes http methods such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. Most commonly used methods to me are GET and POST. And technical aspects of discussion can keep going. However, the question is how we can utilize RESTful web services and how we can make it so that other developers can consume them in easy way? Eventually RESTful web services is for openness. Facebook opens up their RESTful API so that other developers or 3rd party application of facebook can pull up information on users or something like that.

With RESTful API, it is *possible* that you can organize calls.

Let’s look at this imaginable API path for getting a particular movie info.

http://RESTfulAPIHost:Port/movie/

By just looking at the API path, you can take a good guess of what it might return to you. And then after that, you naturally think ahead and append movies name to it.

http://RESTfulAPIHost:Port/movie/dark-knight/

Looking at the API path, I would naturally think that I could expect movie information for the movie “Dark Knight”. This natural thought process leads to more details API paths like these:

http://RESTfulAPIHost:Port/movie/dark-knight/actors/

http://RESTfulAPIHost:Port/movie/dark-knight/credits/

http://RESTfulAPIHost:Port/movie/dark-knight/showtimes/

2009
08/07
CATEGORY
Programming
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Need to write down more often.

I just realized that writing down knowledge or techniques that I’ve already known or practices for a long time helps me organize them in the brain well. Some people talk about a particular topic and I just hear over what they talk thinking “I know about it and have used it already” and then do not join the conversation. That’s a big mistake that I make every single day.

It’s like this: Let’s imagine for seconds. There are many post-its on a table with specific instructions on them for tasks. When there are 10 of them, you can easily find them. However, when there are over 100 or 1000 of them, finding the right post-it note is merely impossible or it will take at least several minutes to several hours. Over time, those post-its will get stacked more and more.

Organizing post-its will definitely get you to find the right one much faster. I think brain works that way. You gain so much knowledge daily basis and if you don’t organize your knowledge well it will be like you have 1000 or move post-its notes everywhere on your desk. I think writing down those things helps you organize your knowledge. Also it can be your future references when you need to recall how you did it in the past.

2009
08/07
CATEGORY
Personal
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