howarddierking.com

Leah is my little sister.

Back in 2012, the folks at Code Project interviewed me as part of their ongoing series profiling developers — their backgrounds, projects, interests, and pet peeves.

If you’re at all like me, you have on occasion scanned upwards on the proverbial organizational chart and muttered something to the effect of, “those good-for-nothing idiots have no clue what they’re doing.”

Before we get too far into it, I wanted to quickly let you know that towards the end of last year, my longtime friend and product leader, Glenn Block and I started a new podcast called “Until the Ice Cream Truck”.

I recently interviewed with a company who was looking for a senior engineering leader, and the conversation took a surprising turn related to management and organization size, so I want to take a few minutes with you good folks and comment on the following

In almost every engineering all-hands I’ve been a part of, the senior engineering leader has a slide where they present a set of core engineering values.

In my side-life, I’m working on developing a backend and reference architecture for a lightweight, reactive, RDF-based architecture, and as things go - particularly in NodeJS applications - clearer understanding of component usage caused me to want to ref…

Jeff Atwood, the co-founder of Stack Overflow and developer who famously said “Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript” wrote a post back in 2005 entitled “You Can Write FORTRAN in any Language”.

Some friends of mine recently released a podcast episode on the topics of attention management related tools, and it turned out that one of the resources they referenced was an old blog post of mine on the topic; so maybe that’s a decent place to start and

(I’ve been sitting on writing this post for a while now because there have been quite a few different pices of the puzzle all up in the air and I’ve been waiting for at least a few of them to land.

If you’ve been around me for any period of time, you’ve probably heard me say that I find two common approaches to software development: the mathematician’s approach and the linguist’s approach.

I’m a big believer that functional programming may be the only way to write reliable Javascript code and stay sane.

One of the most commonly-implored techniques that I’ve heard by the REST faithful to shut down any questioning of the faith is what I’ll call an “appeal to the WWW”.

I received the following question from one of our service teams last week and thought it was likely the type of issue that a lot of you are dealing with (or have solved) in our current world of “microservice all the thingz!”

Every now and then, somebody will ask me what I’m currently reading or researching.

Some of you may know that I’m passionate about helping people from non-traditional computer science background enter our industry and have done quite a bit of work over the last few years towards that end through partnerships with immersive code schools l…

And it’s likely that neither do you One of the projects that my team works on is a GraphQL server.

I originally wrote this as talking points for a conversation I had with my team and wasn’t planning on sharing it more broadly.

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” I’ve written and spoken on the topic of API versioning numerous times over the last several years - particularly in regard to RESTful APIs.

Over the last two years, I’ve had the opportunity to look at a number of different API Gateway products as well as participate in the design and development of a fit for purpose gateway service for my company.

I initially became interested in personal workflow methods and tools when I started at Microsoft in 2006.

I’ve been completely unfocused this week waiting to hear the outcome of a meeting that I knew was planned for Tuesday.

In 2015-2016, there was a fair amount of discussion in the industry about the rise of polyglot development.

Let me open this post by wishing all [ten] of you who read this blog a very happy new year!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on a side project to generate a documentation Web site using Metalsmith for any linked data vocabulary.

I was asked by a colleague recently to share my backlog of business and management related books, so I wanted to share them with you as well.

Over the past several years, I’ve seen lots of architecture-related efforts come and go when it comes to services.

One of my pet projects is an international postal address formatter library.

I’ve spent much of the last couple years thinking about linked data and what that can mean for Web APIs.

As large technology companies transition to services and APIs, there will inevitably be quite a bit of debate around what data a service “owns” (and related: how to stop another service from owning that data), what document schemas should be supported, how

Software developers tend to be a bit hipsterish in that we seem to have an inherent attraction to novel things - especially when those novel things are lifted from the old things of other disciplines.

One of the less stated charters of my team is to push the bounds on system design and innovation within our company’s larger technology group.

For a while now, I’ve held the belief that the biggest reason people get the whole “REST" thing wrong is because they are looking at Roy Fielding’s doctoral dissertation – the paper that coins the term “REST” - as a prescription for how to design APIs.

In response to my recent post on Swagger and REST, I was asked the following on Twitter: @howard_dierking Trying to dig deeper into the philosophy of API specs.

If you’ve spent much time with me, you’ve undoubtedly heard me ramble on at length about linked data.

While I love the simplicity of Jekyll for generating static Web sites from markup documents, the fact that Jekyll is built on Ruby and its respective ecosystem has been giving me increasing frustration.

I’ve spent some time talking with my teams recently about REST from the perspective of an API, and also how APIs built through the lens of technologies like Swagger go against some of the most important principles of REST.

One of the projects that my team owns is the Concur Developer Center.

If there’s one thing that I want for the 10 of you that read this blog (hi dad!)

For the next generation of the Concur Developer Center, we decided to break away from the standard enterprise, CMS-backed Web site and do what has become pretty common practice in the open source world for Web sites: we generated a completely static HTML…

[Warning: Potentially Inflammatory Topic] Today was a bit of a rough day for me in that I did something that is generally a bit aggressive for me.

I have a million and one things that I should be doing right now.

Do you or your company build Web APIs and, if so, do you use an API gateway to broker traffic between your customers and your products?

I’ve been a dev manager now for about 9 months and I have to say that I’m really enjoying this role.

Yup.

We all have see them; most of us have to deal with them; many of us contributed to writing at least one of them.

I’ve been going around to different teams inside of my company recently and talking about how we’ve gone about the task of selecting different tools and technologies for our projects.

I’ve been trying to get caught up on my backlog of things that I generally like doing but haven’t been finding the time to do recently, and a current project at work has me working in the same technology on which this blog is based - so it gave me a conve…

I’ve been kind of quiet in the weeks since leaving Microsoft.

After 8 amazing years, it’s time for me to move on.