It seems like everyone building web software is also building REST APIs and nearly all of those REST APIs use HTTP. Despite that, a lot of developers still struggle with the correct usage of HTTP. The two most common problems I see are with status codes and with HTTP methods. This post will cover HTTP methods, but I plan to write another one to cover status codes.
HTTP methods are complicated and can be even more confusing because many existing APIs use methods incorrectly. There are nine HTTP methods available, but the most commonly used methods for most application REST…
I have attended many women in tech and diversity in leadership events over the years. I’ve started to notice that there is a very dangerous message that seems to come up at nearly every single event. That message is that women and minorities need to change to fit into the white-male dominated corporate cultures that we currently have. This message seems to come up no matter the exact topic of the event or the specified target audience.
Why is this message so prevalent?
The primary reason this message comes up is because of the audience. If I’m speaking to a non-male person of color, the advice…
And Why You Should Care
Last November I started a new job at Split as an engineer on our main Core Backend team. We are in the business of feature flags! Unlike when I was at Box, however, I’m finding that it’s a bit harder to explain what our company does — especially to non-engineers. That said, as the world moves more and more online, things like feature flags start to become important to everyone.
So, what are feature flags (or feature flips or splits or feature toggles or many other names used to mean the same thing)? At a very high level, feature flags…
On Juneteenth, I was on an email thread that blew up. I’m mostly not going to go into the specific details, but essentially, one side was arguing for what I would generally call the ‘all lives matter’ and ‘get rid of all racism/bias’ argument. Meanwhile the other side was arguing that particularly on Juneteenth, we should be uplifting specifically our black brothers and sisters.
One of the responses that particularly struck me was from a black woman. In her response, she directly compares the Japanese internment to the enslavement of Black Americans. I have to admit that my immediate gut…
A Brief Overview of Split’s Authorization Framework Investigation
I’ve previously written several articles on Box’s rewrite of their authorization framework. I was on the team there that evaluated the landscape, chose a solution and built out the initial implementation. I previously discussed at a high level what access control frameworks are, a more in-depth look at what Box chose, and how we made the decision to go with Balana. Now that I’m working at Split, I find myself again exploring options to revamp an authorization framework. While I already had deep knowledge of the landscape, I wanted to make sure I did my due diligence before pushing us…
Scrum seems to be the software development framework that all software companies are using these days. Or at least they all claim to be practicing scrum. To be honest, my best experience with scrum was on a labs team at Microsoft. That team was probably closest to executing scrum as defined by the official framework. On that team, we would often start from near-scratch each sprint, questioning what features we thought we might want to build. We had a backlog, but new things were added every time and things that had been on top previously might become lower priority or…
March 24
I guess I’ve somewhat failed at doing this every day like I meant to.
I’ve found that I’ve been baking/cooking more than normal and if my co-workers and facebook are anything to go by, I’m definitely not alone. My co-workers have started to refer to the #quarantineFifteen. I really hope they’re not right about that. …
My current plan is to write this every day but probably just post these once a week so as not to overwhelm my blog. I’m actually going to post this first one with only two days worth since the first day actually covers around a week, but in the future I’ll save them up for once a week. Also, I’m mostly writing this for myself (even more than normal), so please forgive me if some of it is boring or crazy or not quite linear thought.
3–18–2020
A friend suggested blogging about the Coronavirus experience, so here goes. Today is day…
Now, with the COVID-19, everyone is suddenly finding themselves working from home on what are now suddenly distributed, remote teams. I’m seeing many people panic, having never done this before. The occasional work from home day is a different story — you can avoid distractions, get a bunch done. However, when the reality sets in that everyone is by themselves for the long haul, things start to change. Things like finding ways to create community and connection between remote people is suddenly important. …
In light of International Women’s Day, I want to focus for a minute on my little slice of the world, women in computing. There’s been a lot of talk and focus in tech companies recently about diversity and inclusion, but the fact is that the numbers (at least in terms of gender) still aren’t changing. In fact, the percentage of women in computing jobs was at it’s highest in 1991 (at 36%) and dropped to where it has roughly remained — at 26% as of 2018. Even with the increased focus, things aren’t noticeably changing. …
Joy Ebertz
Sr Staff Software Engineer & ultra runner @SplitSoftware
