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9 posts tagged with "Engineering"

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· 10 min read
Dylan Huang

Open Source vs. Paid OpenAPI Documentation Generators

OpenAPI makes it really easy to generate documentation for your API. There are a number of open source and paid solutions that make it easy to generate documentation for your API. To determine the best solution for your needs, we researched and compared the best open source and paid OpenAPI documentation generators.

At the end, we give our opinion on which solution is best for you depending on your requirements and current setup.

· 6 min read
Dylan Huang
Anh-Tuan Bui

Konfig vs. Open Source

Konfig offers numerous benefits when generating SDKs from OpenAPI compared to utilizing an open-source library or crafting them manually. These benefits significantly impact your engineers and business in a positive manner. In this article, we will outline these crucial advantages.

· 8 min read
Dylan Huang

GitHub Copilot has recently taken the software engineering world by storm, hitting a milestone of $100M ARR. This achievement alone qualifies it to be a publicly listed company. Meanwhile, funding continues to flow into code-focused LLM use cases.

100M ARR
GitHub Copilot crosses 100M ARR Milestone
TabbyML
TabbyML Raising 3.2M for an open-source GitHub Copilot
Tabnine
Tabnine raises $15.5M for AI that autocompletes code
Cursor
Anysphere raises $8M from OpenAI to build an AI-powered IDE
Codium
CodiumAI raises $11M

· 9 min read
Dylan Huang

From DHH shunning serverless, Ahrefs saving millions by using a cloud provider at all, to Amazon raining fire on their own serverless product, serverless has recently faced significant scrutiny.

But still, everyone and their pet goldfish seem to be creating a serverless runtime (see Bun, Deno, Pydantic, Cloudflare, Vercel, Serverless, Neon, Planetscale, Xata, FaunaDB, Convex, Supabase, Hasura, Banana, and literally hundreds more). One research paper from Berkeley even claimed:

Serverless computing will become the default computing paradigm of the Cloud Era, largely replacing serverful computing and thereby bringing closure to the Client-Server Era.

-- Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing

Is it all hype? Is there real 100% objective merit to it? Where does serverless excel? Where do the trade-offs make sense?

To understand how developers are receiving serverless, I went to where developers live: Reddit, Twitter, Hacker News, and YouTube. I parsed 1,000s of discussions and synthesized my findings in this article, striving to present only thought-provoking opinions.

funnel
Funnel for gathering through-provoking opinions

Next, I transcribed these discussions onto a whiteboard, organizing them into "Pro Serverless," "Anti Serverless", or "Neutral" categories, and then clustering them into distinct opinions. Each section in this post showcases an opinion while referencing pertinent discussions.

FigJam
FigJam I used to organize perspectives

· 10 min read
Dylan Huang

Ask any developer: do you prefer GraphQL or REST? This often leads to opinionated conversations, sometimes even devolving into vulgar opinions rather than objective facts.

To delve into the GraphQL vs. REST debate, I scoured platforms where developers frequently discuss such matters: YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, and Hacker News. I parsed 1,000s of discussions and synthesized my findings in this article, striving to present only thought-provoking perspectives.

Discussion funnel
Funnel for gathering through-provoking perspectives

Next, I transcribed these discussions onto a whiteboard, organizing them into "Pro GraphQL," "Pro REST," or "Neutral" categories, and then clustering them into distinct perspectives. Each section in this post showcases a perspective while referencing pertinent discussions. To conclude, I highlight blog posts from GitHub and Shopify that serve as informative case studies in this ongoing debate.

FigJam
FigJam I used to organize perspectives

· 17 min read
Dylan Huang

Imagine you are tasked to write 417,823 lines of code in 6 different languages. What if there was a way to slash that development effort significantly with just a fraction of the effort? Introducing code generation, where a few high-level instructions can do the work for you. In this blog post, we'll dive into the superpower of code generation, uncovering its presence from early programming to modern-day AI assistants.

· 5 min read
Dylan Huang

What exactly is an OpenAPI? In this article, we'll cover the problem that OpenAPI solves and explore its importance in modern software architecture.

As software systems become more interconnected, OpenAPI has emerged as a vital tool for promoting collaboration and enabling seamless integration between different applications. Today large API-first companies like Stripe and Plaid use OpenAPI so it's no surprise that OpenAPI is finding widespread adoption.

Google trend on openapi from 1/1/2017 to 7/10/2023
Google trend on "openapi" from 1/1/2017 to 7/10/2023

· 13 min read
Dylan Huang

Postman

Originally started as a side project, Postman has become one of the best tools for collaboratively building APIs with over 1.29 billion requests created in the past year.

As organizations' investments of time and resources into APIs increase, API-first organizations must leverage testing tools like Postman. Adopting an API tool is an effective way to save thousands of engineering hours.

· 8 min read
Dylan Huang

SDKs makes the integration of REST APIs easier by packaging boilerplate code for developers.

Why do developers need help integrating APIs?

Let's take a look at the numbers.

Plaid has a REST API with 215 operations, 1346 schemas, and 215 parameters.

SnapTrade has a REST API with 91 operations, 125 schemas, and 183 parameters.

Twilio has a REST API with 199 operations, 152 schemas, and 874 parameters.

The complexity of these APIs can be daunting for developers who are under a time pressure to integrate an API and frustrating for API companies because onboarding is time consuming. Developers are required to parse tons of documentation and code while API companies must provide continuous support for a successful partnership. To make matters worse, developers can be using a programming language that nobody at the API company knows. To alleviate the pain, best-in-class API companies publish SDKs to accelerate the integration process.