During the week (well, last week, I think), a strange thing happened. I got an email from GitHub, where I keep the source code for the site, saying that someone wanted to fix a bug in the site. So I had a look at what they suggested and it made perfect sense, so I accepted the change. So since then that developer and I have been chatting, and now I have a collaborator. Or at the very least, a second opinion on many things. This is very odd for a doctor of friendlessness such as myself.
Now I have been a programmer longer than most people have been alive (source) so I have a great many opinons about programming things, but for much of the technology used in Extended Stats Serverless, I’m quite new to it. And being a humble motherfucker with a big ass appetite to learn, I’m very happy to take advice on these techs.
So one thing that has been on my mind is a product called Swagger (now changed to the Open API Initiative, which is a very dull name). Swagger is a system for describing APIs. An API is an application programming interface, which means it’s a way to talk to an application by programming. These days, it is coming to mostly mean a way to talk to a web application by making calls to the web site. One way to use an API is as the back-end to the web site, which is what I do.
When you go to extstats.drfriendless.com, all of that stuff is being loaded from AWS S3 (think of that as Amazon’s hard drive). Then the code runs in your web browser and talks to api.drfriendless.com to retrieve data – api.drfriendless.com implements the API. So what I was doing with Swagger was documenting what you could say to the API and what it would say back.
That doesn’t sound hard. And indeed it wasn’t, to do the sort of half-assed job that I did. Nevertheless it came to about a thousand lines, which took quite a while to do. I’m sure you’re desperate to see what I produced, so here it is:
https://app.swaggerhub.com/apis/DrFriendless/ExtendedStatsServerless/1.0.0
Yeah. Although the swaggerhub interface is nice, it’s still pretty dry stuff. Nevertheless I felt it was an essential bit of due diligence that I should do. And while doing I found a few cases where I thought “huh? why did I do it like that?” which I will probably go back and redo to be more sensible. So that’s a good thing.
