Api on traviscj/blog

Evolution of a Get Endpoint

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 19:47:52 -0500

My work project started pretty simple: there was a simple GetXyz endpoint that just looked up the xyz record in the database by a unique key & returned it. How complicated could it be?

It was a straightforward generalization of an old GetAbc functionality, it was really only used by oncall engineers through an admin console, it shouldn’t have been too big of a deal.

Ok, but then it outgrew its original datastore, so a separate service had to be created. We thought about migrating clients, but at the time it seemed faster to just implement once on our side & have clients continue calling us; essentially encapsulating the separate service as an implementation detail. But as part of the traffic swing, we figured it should support either the local or the remote read path.

Transacter and Intent/Result

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 08:07:47 -0500

At SQ, we had a family of Transacter interfaces:

public interface Transacter {
  void transaction(Function<Session, Void> session);
  
  public interface Session {
    DSLContext dsl();
  }
}

where DSLContext is a jOOQ concept & is the handle for doing work against the database. Then this would be used in some class like

public class KvDao {
  @Inject Transacter transacter;
  
  void put(String ns, String k, String v) {
    transacter.transaction(session -> {
        KvRecord record = new KvRecord(ns, k, v);
        session.dsl().insertInto(KV).set(record).execute();
    });
  }
}

The parameters ns, k, and v are shorthand for namespace, key, and value, respectively. We’ll show how these might be used together shortly!

interceptors

Mon, 18 May 2020 15:13:00 -0700

INTERCEPTORS ARE SO COOL!

Sometimes you need some “generic rails” that are still highly adaptable to other uses. This is the basic problem solved by the Interceptor pattern.

I really love the way OkHttp does interceptors for the generic rails of making HTTP calls, so I wanted to walk through a case study of why an interceptor might be useful and then try to synthesize some lessons & a minimal example of the pattern.

unreasonable wish -- an sql interface to websites

Sun, 06 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I was searching Amazon Prime for some Earl Grey tea for my wife. I got these results

This was just a basic search for earl grey tea in the Prime Pantry store.

I would love to

SELECT *
FROM products p
WHERE p.prime_pantry = 1
  AND p.keywords = 'earl grey tea'
  AND p.packaging = 'bulk'

I get that this’ll never happen, but man… it’d be nice.

mysql feeds

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

At work, we use a pattern called feeds that gets an incredible amount of work done. I’ve been wanting to describe it here for quite a while, and now seems as good of time as any.

The basic premise is: You have a service A with some data that other “consuming” services B, C, and D want to find out about. Maybe the data is payments, maybe it’s support cases, maybe it’s password changes… whatever. The other services might include your data warehouse, some event listeners, whatever.

sfpark api

Tue, 24 Apr 2018 16:29:39 +0000

I recently came to learn of the SFpark API, which lets one make queries like:

LAT=37.787702
LONG=-122.407796
curl "http://api.sfpark.org/sfpark/rest/availabilityservice?lat=${LAT}&long=${LONG}&radius=0.25&uom=mile&response=json" | pbcopy
pbpaste | jq '.AVL[] | select (.TYPE | contains("OFF"))'

and get a response including records like:

{
  "TYPE": "OFF",
  "OSPID": "950",
  "NAME": "Union Square Garage",
  "DESC": "333 Post Street",
  "INTER": "Geary between Stockton & Powell",
  "TEL": "(415) 397-0631",
  "OPHRS": {
    "OPS": {
      "FROM": "7 Days/Wk",
      "BEG": "24 Hrs/Day"
    }
  },
  "OCC": "381",
  "OPER": "670",
  "PTS": "1",
  "LOC": "-122.407447946,37.7876789151"
}

Pretty cool!

todobackend.com

Fri, 05 Jan 2018 00:01:00 +0000

TodoBackend.com defines a simple API and has a frontend that works given any backend URL.

Particularly interesting to me:

haskell
- super concise!
- whoa, 6 different backends!
- spock backend is crazy concise.
python + flask
- seems like it would greatly benefit from a Store object
scala + akka
- crazy pattern matching in routes definition
java + mangooio + jOOQ
- especially the distinction between Todo and TodoPatch
- also really glad I don’t have to write routes config separately from the code!
clojure + jetty/compojure + postgresql
rails
go + goa

url encoding safe relational operators

Wed, 29 Nov 2017 07:55:04 +0000

I was catching up on Jesse Wilson’s blog this morning, and in particular his post URL Encoding Is Material. In that article, he says

My advice

If you’re defining your own URLs, you’ll save a lot of trouble by avoiding characters like <, >, {, }, +, ^, &, |, and ;.

I came across this problem in one of my projects at work: I wanted a page to display some recent records with 1) a name field provided by the user and 2) a value field that match $l \leq \text{value} \leq b$, where $l$ and $b$ are given by the user. I also wanted that page to have a URL representing that condition, so that it could be easily shared with teammates and soforth. When I started working on it, I didn’t have Jesse’s wisdom, and so I naively came up with a URL structure something like

basic http requests and server handlers in clojure

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been playing around a tiny bit with clojure, and wanted to document the process of doing something pretty basic: make a project that can request my website over HTTPs.

The first step is pretty easy:

brew install leiningen
lein new random-experimentation
cd random-experimentation

and add [clj-http "3.4.1"] to project.clj.

The HTTPS part is a bit trickier. The JDK doesn’t include the Letsencrypt certificates. But I found a simple script install-letsencrypt-in-jdk.sh that can set it up.

filter vs spec (draft)

Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Consider a silly data model to store data about cities like

message City {
  optional string city_name = 1;
  optional string state = 2;
  optional int32 population = 3;
  optional int32 year_founded = 4;
  // ... presumably others :-)
}

and some sample data like:

[
  {"city_name": "Portland", "state": "OR", "population": ...},
  {"city_name": "Portland", "state": "ME", "population": ...},
  {"city_name": "Springfield", "state": "FL", "population": ...},
  {"city_name": "Springfield", "state": "IL", "population": ...},
  {"city_name": "Springfield", "state": "CO", "population": ...}
]

There are some useful entities we can define: (DRAFT NB: don’t read too much into the matcher vs filter lingo.)

CBCL: The Common Business Communication Language

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 23:05:28 +0000

I recently came across McCarthy’s CBCL paper on Hacker News. He presents a Lisp notation as a format for sharing requests between different software on different computers. He calls out

(PLEASE-RESERVE (EPSILON (x) 
  (AND
    (IS-FLIGHT x) 
    (DEPARTS MONDAY) 
    (ARRIVES (BEFORE WEDNESDAY)))))

where $\epsilon x$ is an operator maps a predicate to a value matching the predicate, and considers it an improvement on the “iota” definite description operator, which seems to be an operator that returns the unique value matching the predicate. It seems interesting to me that the unique match operator is not considered as useful as the arbitrary match operator – unique keys actually seem critical to a lot of my work with data models. Even more fascinating, though, is that this looks like an anonymous function!