[HN Gopher] The Light and Dark Side of the API Economy
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       The Light and Dark Side of the API Economy
        
       Author : mooreds
       Score  : 22 points
       Date   : 2021-12-18 23:05 UTC (23 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.swyx.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.swyx.io)
        
       | thr0wawayf00 wrote:
       | > Hundreds of millions of people use Excel. What if all the APIs
       | we just talked about were accessible to regular folks, or
       | "Citizen Developers"?
       | 
       | I've been living this scenario recently, leading development of
       | an integration with Okta and SCIM and it has been pure, unabated
       | hell. One of the most insanely frustrating projects I've ever
       | worked on, hands down.
       | 
       | Okta picks and chooses which aspects of the SCIM standard to
       | implement, and intentionally deviates from the standard in some
       | cases. To be fair, all of the major identity providers do this,
       | Okta isn't the only offender.
       | 
       | They don't provide any kind of comprehensive test suite to
       | validate compatibility with third-party SCIM APIs, and because
       | you're interacting with a GUI and Okta's internal system log,
       | which does not provide access to the HTTP layer, things fail in
       | the strangest, most opaque ways. Their backend behaves very
       | differently depending on which kind of template app you start out
       | with, and they don't document clearly how this behavior differs
       | (probably because it would be really embarrassing to put
       | something like that on the record).
       | 
       | Slapping a GUI on top of these HTTP interactions has been an
       | absolute abomination to work with and I'm convinced that "no-
       | code" is total scam as long as the actual developer experience
       | isn't considered, which is why open source tooling largely took
       | off in the first place. Companies that aren't in the developer
       | tools market don't give a shit about developer experience.
        
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       (page generated 2021-12-19 23:01 UTC)