This is probably one of the more esoteric posts on my blog — I’m usually very technical and rational. But with the rise of “vibe coding” and the growing trend of people using AI to generate entire applications, I feel the need to share something more personal.
I’m not trying to channel Jony Ive here, but I do think there’s a fundamental truth buried beneath all the marketing buzzwords: people can sense care — and carelessness — in the things we build.
Over Christmas, I decided to finally tackle learning Elixir. Since I learn new programming languages best by actually building something, I set out to implement a simple RSS reader/sync service, similar to Miniflux and FreshRSS.
Since I actually want to use this app, it needs to have a way to connect to my client apps (Reeder 5/Classic on iOS and macOS, as well as NewsFlash on Linux). Since the Google Reader API implementation is well-supported in most RSS clients, I set out to build an API compatible with the existing spec.
The company I’m working at provides eCommerce solutions for many years now. A few years ago we decided to give up on our own product and started to become an agency that would work with a existing eCommerce application from now on. In our own software, we provided a SOAP API which hadn’t changed for years that had some client-side implementations in various ERP systems and when we switched over, we decided to provide a compatibility plugin for the new software that would expose the SOAP facade we built years ago and translate all requests to the REST API (which we called internally without going over HTTP again).
