Laravel is Harmful
In this issue of APIs You Won't Hate (the newsletter), it feels like PHP is everywhere! We also talk about microservices, monoliths, and APIs-as-a-service.
For the last two weeks, it's felt like I can not escape PHP. The post about Laravel being harmful made me chuckle. My feeling is that you can make great and bad things... with any framework. Even as someone who spends a lot of time in JS land, you must respect the web that PHP helped build.
To top it off, Vercel and Deno dropped new databases and key values stores. Combine this with updates from React, and the world is aflame with the JS community reinventing PHP. Let's be honest; everything old is new again. I tend to avoid taking sides as we know who will win 😉. JavaScript is now coming full circle to combine the backend and frontend again; it will be interesting to see what happens with API layers.
We should show love to all languages and frameworks. Except for Java, seriously, use Kotlin. 🤣
Alexander
Monthly API Round-Up
Our monthly round-up of articles, news and updates from the web.
Microservices to a Monolith
The Amazon Prime Video team discusses moving from serverless microservices to a monolith. The move saved them 90% in costs. Before jumping on the bandwagon of bashing serverless or microservices, it is worth taking a moment. In development, there is never a solution, just tradeoffs. If you want a balanced response to the drama that has kicked off around this issue, Kelsey Hightower as always responded with wise words.
GraphQL, gRPC or REST
A talk by Rob Crowley from 2019 about choosing the right tool for the job. Everything has a tradeoff, and as much as I love REST, sometimes you might find other approaches to API development a better fit.
Should it be a Microservice?
With all this talk of microservices vs monoliths, I thought it would be prudent to include this article by Yoni Goldberg. This a great article with a point system on when to move something into its own service.
Understanding Distributed Systems
The previous link and this one might make you think I want you all to build microservices; don't worry, I don't. This book is a great read, even if, for some weird reason, you find yourself drawing sides. As an API or backend developer, you will have to build distributed systems at some point. Nice to be ready when the day comes.
How to be a -10x Engineer
Taylor Town had me laughing all morning with this insightful article.
Google Cloud's Parisian Outage
Google Cloud's outage has extended into its third week and possibly even a fourth. Given the escalating impact of climate change, which triggers heightened weather disruptions and significant temperature fluctuations, it seems likely that we will witness an increase in outages across all cloud service providers in the coming years.
APIs You Won't Hate
The latest content from the team at API's You Won't Hate.
🎙️APIs You Won't Hate (the podcast)
Mike has FastGen co-founder Constantin Schreiber on the show to talk about FastGen's no-code API and workflow builder products.
APIMatic Review: Developer Experience-as-a-Service
From somewhere deep in the forest, Phil takes some time to review APIMatic.
From Our Community
Articles written and shared in our free Slack community.
Getting Started with OpenAPI
Not written by our community but an outstanding share by Alex Savage in our Slack community. If you want to start with OpenAPI, this is an excellent place to start.
Portman and Contract Testing
Alex Savage popped up twice this week with an article he has written covering contract testing. See how you can use Portman with OpenAPI and Postman. Thanks for sharing this one, Alex.
Thanks so much for reading. If you found this helpful, share it with a friend - it helps out a great deal. 👾
