Dare Obasanjo
25hoursaday.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2007
Dare Obasanjo, a former Microsoft engineer, writes about web APIs and REST, software careers, company culture, and tech industry strategy.
What HN saysHN links it for his REST API design posts, scalability follow-ups, and his C# versus Java comparison page.
71HN people shared it
13linked it in comments
159stories submitted
1.5Kstory points
2 years agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Why are Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo copying Microsoft's stack ranking system?2 people · 202 points · first shared 2013 · 164 comments on HN
- 2Paul Graham, Changing the World and "Built to Flip" Startups2 people · 50 points · first shared 2008 · 24 comments on HN
- 3Two Cardinal Sins of REST API Design: Lessons you can Learn from the NewsGator REST API2 people · 16 points · first shared 2008 · 9 comments on HN
- 4Amazon EC2 + S3 Doesn't Cut it for Real Applications2 people · 6 points · first shared 2007 · 8 comments on HN
- 5Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast (2016)2 people · 4 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 6REST API: Invent Media Types, Not Protocols and Understand the Importance of Hyperlinks2 people · 3 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
- 7C# From a Java Developer's Perspective2 people · 2 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 8Google Scalability Conference Trip Report: Scaling Google for Every User2 people · 1 points · first shared 2007 · discussion on HN
- 9Weblog2 people · first shared 2007
- 10How the engineer driven culture at Google damaged Wave1 people · 72 points · first shared 2010 · 67 comments on HN
- 11Project Cassandra: Facebook's Open Source Alternative to Google BigTable1 people · 58 points · first shared 2008 · 22 comments on HN
- 12Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPub and XML on the Web1 people · 53 points · first shared 2011 · 45 comments on HN
- 13Explaining REST to Damien Katz1 people · 51 points · first shared 2008 · 20 comments on HN
- 14Mike Shroepfer on Engineering at Scale at Facebook1 people · 49 points · first shared 2009 · 1 comments on HN
- 15The NoSQL Debate: Automatic vs. Manual Transmission1 people · 39 points · first shared 2010 · 34 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
iamelgringo · 2007-12-01
Interesting follow up here:
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=067a2eb8-85c0-48…
Even Big Co.'s like Microsoft and the GOOG have scalability issues.
dood · 2007-07-30
In case you missed it, check the comments in this link [http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CommentView.aspx?guid=f8e678cc-045a-… discussed here [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33093].
The suggestion is to constantly write db logs from EC2 to S3 instead of nightly backup, so that in the event of a crash you're only likely to lose minutes worth of data.
Also note that you can restart instances with no loss of data. Its only in failures that you would lose data.
smoody · 2008-10-25
There was a link to an article posted yesterday or the day before on HN that attempted to interpret the original article. Here's the link:
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/10/24/RESTAPIDesignInventMediaT…
I have to admit it's still a bit confusing to me. However, look at this snippet extracted from a comment by the author of the article you provided:
"A truly RESTful API looks like hypertext. Every addressable unit of information carries an address, either explicitly (e.g., link and id attributes) or implicitly (e.g., derived from the media type definition and representation structure). Query results are represented by a list of links with summary information, not by arrays of object representations (query is not a substitute for identification of resources)."
And this snippet from the second:
"The latest drafts of the OpenSocial specification have a great example of how a service can use existing technologies such as URI templates to make even complicated URL structures to be flexible and discoverable without having to force every client and service to hardcode a specific URL structure."
This, to me, states that a restful api should implement api discoverability and give people a method to generate URI for any api call without hard-coding URIs into your code. A snippet from the article I linked-to that defines a URI template:
<os:URI-Template>http://api.example.org/groups/{guid}</os:URI-Template>
It's…
iso8859-1 · 2015-09-10
See http://www.25hoursaday.com/CsharpVsJava.html#assemblies (and the rest of that page)
and http://stackoverflow.com/q/90578/309483
jamesbritt · 2012-11-01
Possibly related (from 2005): "SOA, AJAX and REST: The Software Industry Devolves into the Fashion Industry"
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=018ea507-4a62-44…
seanlinmt · 2011-01-29
Here's a more exhaustive comparison of Java and C#. http://www.25hoursaday.com/CsharpVsJava.html
TomOfTTB · 2010-10-15
I actually like your terminology more but I've generally heard the term Hi-REST and Low-REST in this context
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=0df3b480-0ea2-4b…
aaronbrethorst · 2010-03-03
Dare Obasanjo, a Program Manager at Microsoft and son of the former President of Nigeria [1], has run into this same issue on his (ahem, non-notable) blog: "[I]t irritates me that I have a Wikipedia entry with a giant banner that claims I'm lying about my parenthood" [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olusegun_Obasanjo
[2] http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/03/13/WikipediaWhosYourDaddy.as…
pasbesoin · 2009-06-04
Dare's blog is still up and reachable:
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/
but the particular link provided by the parent is rerouting to the obnoxious front page at rotten.com, which some may consider NSFW. The same behavior is observed when trying to access the post from the link on the front page of Dare's blog.
Because of this, I'm flagging this submission. Maybe Dare can get his blog straightened out; but in the meantime, the link is not directly useful or appropriate.
paul · 2008-08-15
Exactly right. The dogma that develops around these kinds of things is so weird.
Update: Here is a good example of silly REST dogma: http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/06/10/TwoCardinalSinsOfRESTAPID… (since a lot of people don't seem to understand that REST isn't the same as HTTP, but more like a religion layered on top of HTTP).
nanijoe · 2007-10-14
Interesting tidbit here..The Nigerian president's son works for Microsoft.
He's also a pretty prominent blogger..Check him out here.
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/
piers · 2007-09-19
I've not used it, but have a read of this: http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/07/04/AmazonEC2S3DoesntCutItFor…
petercooper · 2008-07-09
This piece mentions "No manual intervention" and backs that up with some reasons why Google supposedly doesn't have any manual intervention in the ordering of search results.
If that's true, then does that mean the eval.google.com "secret" back-end application supposedly used by teams of moderators to manipulate search results was a fabrication or just not under the principle of "manual intervention"? Or, do activities two years ago not count in the principles shared today?
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/29726.htm
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/01/1532216&tid=217
http://www.searchbistro.com/index.php?/archives/19-Google-Secret-Lab,-…
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/is-eval-google-back-on-track.html
Marissa Meyer is also supposed (and a big stress on /supposed/) to have said that Google has 10,000 people checking search results for relevance:
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/06/26/GoogleScalabilityConferen…