Tag Archives: rest

Interesting post: REST = FIOH (F**k It, Overlord HTTP)

Interesting post on how REST got misappropriated! Too bad that this blog has stopped publishing. Here are some “least” accurate bits from this post. The post is richer than what I put here as clickbait ;-).

… in the mid-2000s, the people who were sick of SOAP and wanted to do something else needed their own four-letter acronym… Among this crowd, SOAP inspired contempt. Ruby-on-Rails dropped SOAP support in 2007…

If the get-shit-done crowd wasn’t going to use SOAP, they still needed some standard way of doing things. Since everyone was using HTTP, and since everyone would keep using HTTP at least as a transport layer because of all the proxying and caching support, the simplest possible thing to do was just rely on HTTP’s existing semantics. So that’s what they did. They could have called their approach Fuck It, Overload HTTP (FIOH), and that would have been an accurate name, as anyone who has ever tried to decide what HTTP status code to return for a business logic error can attest….

Luckily, there was this dissertation out there, written by a co-author of the HTTP/1.1 specification, that had something vaguely to do with extending HTTP and could offer FIOH a veneer of academic respectability. So REST was appropriated to give cover for what was really just FIOH.

August 2, 2025: Weekly Note 2025/07

  • My energy is coming back after a couple of weeks of mild flu like symptoms. I still have occasional cough. I have 500km left to run to complete 1000km of run this year i.e. 5 months and 500km. Not bad!
  • This week was pretty boring, work-wise, routine CRUD stuff. Creating a UI that can CRUD a database properly turns out to be much harder than I expected. I am not yet sure what I did wrong. This maybe in the nature of the problem. I’ve selected a few courses/reading material on database design in hope to discover more. My working hypothesis is that it was inevitable because we simultaneously build and used the portal — waterfall model is from the days when web-development was mostly about this kind of work.
  • Software Radio had a good podcast https://se-radio.net/2025/07/se-radio-679-wesley-beary-on-api-design/ this week. It covered API design in many other episodes. Also learnt about Zalando RESTful API and Event Guidelines
  • I did a couple of interviews at work. One candidate was passable, but his CTC demands were way too high. Can’t blame a guy for trying!
  • Please keep your JD to the point and “boring”. If you add fluff, you invite fluff! I imagine a very few engineer who enjoys development getting excited about other things. You can mention anything else at the end. Especially if you don’t want to read unrelated things in a resume, keep them out of JD as well.
  • While reviewing a candidate profile, I ended up logging to leetcode after so many years. One this led to another, and I ended up doing a few problems this week. Not gonna lie, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I won’t be surprised if I end up spending more time there! That mean my project of writing a parser for netlist file will get delayed a bit.
  • Read A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy by Clay Shirky, an old classic. I learnt about this article from crell blog.