I really liked this picture. Don’t know who’s the author, but I found it here. And if you want to know how historically accurate it is, here’s the Wikipedia page for you.
Year: 2016
New York to Berlin flight illustrated
I came across this link a while back, but somehow failed to share. Christoph Niemann, a talented artist with a good sense of humor, illustrates his flight from New York to Berlin. It’s not a laughing out loud collection of images, but it’ll make you smile.
Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API
An API is a user interface for developers. Put the effort in to ensure it’s not just functional but pleasant to use.
Vinay Sahni has a rather lengthy, detailed, and well-rounded post on how to design a good RESTful API. It covers pretty much everything from URL structures and parameters, request methods, to error handling, documentation, and coding style.
Common files in PHP packages
Jordi Boggiano looks at some common files in PHP packages, using Packagist as a data source. There are some interesting metrics in there. For example:
- 58% of packages include a src/ directory and 5% a lib/ one. That’s surprisingly low to me, that means a lot have the code simply in the root folder.
- 4% have a bin/ directory, including some sort of CLI executables.
- 55% have a LICENSE file, that’s.. pretty disastrous but hopefully a lot of those that don’t at least indicate in the README and composer.json
- 49% have some file or directory indicating the presence of tests (phpunit.xml & co). I am not sure if this is good or bad news to be honest, that depends on your expectations.
Bad project
CommitStrip nails one of the ways of getting into a bad project …
I remember reading an interview with Matt Mullenweg (though can’t seem to find a reference now), where he said that this sort of thing happened with Automattic. People were asking them for commercial support, but they didn’t want to do it, so they started with an insane amount of like $5,000 per month and all of a sudden found themselves with a queue of people outside.
And they were not alone, of course.