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Writing is clarifying
Personal blog · subbu.orgcareerprogrammingwriting
Writing is clarifying is a personal blog at subbu.org about career, programming and writing. Since 2007, 43 different Hacker News readers have linked it 74 times, most often “Nodejs vs Play for Front-End Apps”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-11, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite Subbu Allamaraju's posts on REST, API design, OAuth and a Node.js vs Play benchmark. One commenter calls him the REST proponent who speaks the most sense.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- Called the REST proponent who 'speaks the most sense', understanding that APIs match the context of the problem rather than being 100% RESTful.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Practical wisdom on technology leadership and developing yourself as a leader
Most-linked posts?
- Nodejs vs Play for Front-End Apps3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-03-27
- Shaping Your Authenticity2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-01-16
- Taming the Rate of Change2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-11-20
- Automate Everything – But Don’t Ignore Drift2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-10-09
- My Leadership Document – 2021 Edition2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-06-20
- Click Ops2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-07-13
- OpenStack is Not Cloud2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-07-25
- Mid Career Stuckness2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-07-23
What Hacker News says?
Ah, looks like this is the library Subbu Allamaraju refers to at http://www.subbu.org/blog/2011/11/apis-are-a-pain--the aim of ql.io is to alleviate the challenges of "aggregation, parallelization, and orchestration of forks and joins." (i.e. in practice, "consistent RESTful APIs don’t matter as much as we think," nice though they may be.)
Comment linking /blog/2011/11/apis-are-a-pain--the
on “Ebay launches query language”Submitted Leading vs. Participating as a story · 67 points
HN discussionOAuth is an authentication mechanism, meaning it implements a principle of logic stating that a subject is who he/she claims to be (authN), and then asserts that to a relying party (authR). In other words, OAuth establishes identity. Your question about MITM is answered at http://www.subbu.org/blog/2010/09/oauth-2-0-and-cookie-conve... .
Comment linking /blog/2010/09/oauth-2-0-and-cookie-convergence
on “The OAuth chronicles: I am not stupid”Submitted Don't build private clouds as a story · 66 points
HN discussionSubbu Allamaraju (ex-Yahoo, now eBay) has been the one proponent of REST that I believe speaks the most sense. He understands that most "RESTful" APIs out there leave HATEOS as an afterthought, but he doesn't believe there is such a thing as a 100% RESTful API - you match the architectural style to the context of the problem you are trying to solve. http://www.subbu.org/
Comment linking /
on “Parse Releases Their REST API”Submitted Give Me Bare-Metal as a story · 47 points
HN discussionThis will go into detail far more than I can in a post. http://www.subbu.org/blog/2008/04/nouns-and-resources but the tl;dr is REST nouns are a construct in which you identify all of your objects in a system, these become your REST endpoints such as User in which you have GET, POST, PUT, DELETE each of these verbs causing a specific action on the object or noun. This works great for a large portion of the applicatio…
Comment linking /blog/2008/04/nouns-and-resources
on “REST is over”Submitted Contemporary Views on Serverless and Implications as a story · 46 points
HN discussionPoint well taken - there was no such intention. I updated the charts to show req/sec and mean response time separately. See http://www.subbu.org/blog/2011/03/nodejs-vs-play-for-front-e...
Comment linking /blog/2011/03/nodejs-vs-play-for-front-end-apps
on “Nodejs vs Play for Front-End Apps”Submitted Nodejs vs Play for Front-End Apps as a story · 27 points
HN discussionSubmitted Taming the Rate of Change as a story · 19 points
HN discussionSubmitted MVC may be Slowing Down Your Site as a story · 18 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tangled Mess as a story · 13 points
HN discussionSubmitted Getting Paid To Do What You Love as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Diagnose Before You Delegate as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted REST: Protocols vs Styles as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted REST: Nouns and Resources as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Leading in Low-Trust Times as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Being Nice and Effective as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted State of AWS Compute Pricing as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted OpenStack is Not Cloud as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted APIs are a Pain as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Making Up Movies as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted My Leadership Document – 2021 Edition as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Automate Everything – But Don’t Ignore Drift as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted OpenStack is not Cloud as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Performance of RESTful Apps as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Large scale website development as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Measuring REST as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Elephant in the Brownfield as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
