Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mattbrewsbytes 1007 days ago
The title reads like it came from an MBA biz-bro that doesn't want to do anything properly because it wastes time and costs money. FWIW, I skimmed the article.

Building an API for a new application is a pretty simple undertaking and gives you an abstraction layer between your data model and API consumers. Building a suite of tests against that API that run continuously with merges to a develop/test environment will help ensure quality. Why would anyone advise to just blatantly skip out on solid application design principles? (clicks probably)

1 comments

The guy knows what he's talking about [0].

> Building an API for a new application is a pretty simple undertaking

This is super untrue, backend engineering is pretty hard and complicated, and there aren't enough people to do it. And this is coming from someone who thinks it should be replaced with SaaS stuff like Hasura and not a manual process anymore.

> Building a suite of tests against that API that run continuously with merges to a develop/test environment will help ensure quality.

You can test your data pipelines too; we do at my job and it's a lot easier than managing thousands of lines of PyTest (or whatever) tests.

> Why would anyone advise to just blatantly skip out on solid application design principles?

Because building an API takes a lot of time and money, and maintaining it takes even more. It would be cool if we didn't have to do it.

[0]: https://github.com/benbjohnson