Three Ways To Become a Better Software Professional

The other day InfoQ posted an article on software craftsmanship.

In my view, software craftsmanship is no more or less than being a good professional. Here are three main ways to become one.

1. See the Big Picture

Let’s start with why. Software rules the world and thus we rule the world. And we all know that with great power comes great responsibility.

Now, what is responsible behavior in this context?

It’s many things. It’s delivering software that solves real needs, that works reliably, is secure, is a pleasure to use, etc. etc.

There is one constant in all these aspects: they change. Business needs evolve. New security threats emerge. New usability patterns come into fashion. New technology is introduced at breakneck speed.

The number one thing a software professional must do is to form an attitude of embracing change. We cope with change by writing programs that are easy to change.

Adaptability is not something we’ll explicitly see in the requirements; it’s silently assumed. We must nevertheless take our responsibility to bake it in.

Unfortunately, adaptability doesn’t find its way into our programs by accident. Writing programs that are easy to change is not easy but requires a considerable amount of effort and skill. The skill of a craftsman.

2. Hone Your Skills

How do we acquire the required skills to keep our programs adaptable?

We need to learn. And the more we learn, the more we’ll find that there’s always more to learn. That should make us humble.

How do we learn?

By reading/watching/listening, by practicing, and by doing. We need to read a lot and go to conferences to infuse our minds with fresh ideas. We need to practice to put such new ideas to the test in a safe environment. Finally, we need to incorporate those ideas into our daily practices to actually profit from them.

BTW, I don’t agree with the statement in the article that

Programmers cannot improve their skills by doing the same exercise repeatedly.

One part of mastering a skill is building muscle memory, and that’s what katas like Roman Numerals are for. Athletes and musicians understand that all too well.

But we must go even further. There is so much to learn that we’ll have to continuously improve our ability to do so to keep up. Learning to learn is a big part of software craftsmanship.

3. Work Well With Others

Nowadays software development is mostly a team sport, because we’ve pushed our programs to the point where they’re too big to ~~fail~~ build alone. We are part of a larger community and the craftsmanship model emphasizes that.

There are both pros and cons to being part of a community. On the bright side, there are many people around us who share our interests and are willing to help us out, for instance in code retreats. The flip side is that we need to learn soft skills, like how to influence others or how to work in a team.

Being effective in a community also means our individually honed skills must work well with those of others. Test-Driven Development (TDD), for example, can’t successfully be practiced in isolation. An important aspect of a community is its culture, as the DevOps movement clearly shows.

To make matters even more interesting, we’re actually simultaneously part of multiple communities: our immediate team, our industry (e.g. healthcare), and our community of interest (e.g. software security or REST), to name a few. We should participate in each, understanding that each of those communities will have their own culture.

It’s All About the Journey

Software craftsmanship is not about becoming a master and then resting on your laurels.

While we should aspire to master all aspects of software development, we can’t hope to actually achieve it. It’s more about the journey than the destination. And about the fun we can have along the way.

The State of REST

rest-easy The S in REST stands for State. Unfortunately, state is an overloaded word.

In this post I’ll discuss the two different kinds of state that apply to REST APIs.

Applications

The first type of state is application state, as in Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State (HATEOAS), the distinguishing feature of the REST architectural style.

We must first understand what exactly an application in a RESTful architecture is and isn’t. A REST API is not an interface to an application, but an interface for an application.

A RESTful service is just a bunch of interrelated and interconnected resources. In and of themselves they don’t make up an application. It’s a particular usage pattern of those resources that turn them into an application.

The term application pertains more to the client than to the server. It’s possible to build different applications on top of the same resources. It’s also possible to build an application out of resources hosted on different servers or even by different organizations (mashups).

Application State vs. Resource State

The stateless constraint of REST doesn’t say that a server can’t maintain any state, it only says that a server shouldn’t maintain application (or session) state.

A server is allowed to maintain other state. In fact, most servers would be completely useless if they didn’t. Think of the Amazon web store without any books! We call this resource state to distinguish it from application state.

So where do we draw the line between resource state and application state?

Resource state is information we want to be available between multiple sessions of the same user, and between sessions of different users. Resource state can initially be supplied by either servers (e.g. books) or clients (e.g. book reviews).

Application state is the information that pertains to one particular session of the application. The contents of my shopping cart could be application state, for instance.

Note that this is not how Amazon implemented it; they keep this state on the server. That doesn’t mean that the people at Amazon don’t understand REST. The web browser that I use to shop isn’t sophisticated enough to maintain the application state. Also, they want me to be able to close my browser and return to my shopping cart tomorrow.

This example shows that what is application and what resource state is a design decision.

Application state pertains to the goal the user is trying to achieve while driving the client. It is this state that we’re referring to when we talk about state diagrams for REST APIs, not the resource state.

State Transfer

Application state is all the information maintained on the client side while the user is trying to accomplish a goal. This information is built up piece by piece based on the resource state that is transferred between client and server.

The resource state is transferred as a representation, a particular serialization of the resource state suitable for inclusion in an HTTP message body.

Serialization is governed by the rules laid out in a media type. There are many different media types, some more mature than others.

Since clients and servers transfer representations of resource state, we speak of Representational State Transfer (REST).

How To Return Error Details From REST APIs

The HTTP protocol uses status codes to return error information. This facility, while extremely useful, is too limited for many use cases. So how do we return more detailed information?

There are basically two approaches we can take:

Use a dedicated media type that contains the error details
Include the error details in the used media type

Dedicated Error Media Types

There are at least two candidates in this space:

Problem Details for HTTP APIs is an IETF draft that we’ve used in some of our APIs to good effect. It treats both problem types and instances as URIs and is extensible. This media type is available in both JSON and XML flavors.
application/vnd.error+json is for JSON media types only. It also feels less complete and mature to me.

A media type dedicated to error reporting has the advantage of being reusable in many REST APIs. Any existing libraries for handling them could save us some effort. We also don’t have to think about how to structure the error details, as someone else has done all that hard work for us.

However, putting error details in a dedicated media type also increases the burden on clients, since they now have to handle an additional media type.

Another disadvantage has to do with the Accept header. It’s highly unlikely that clients will specify the error media type in Accept. In general, we should either return 406 or ignore the Accept header when we can’t honor it. The first option is not acceptable (pun intended), the second is not very elegant.

Including Error Details In Regular Media Type

We could also design our media types such that they allow specifying error details. In this post, I’m going to stick with three mature media types: Mason, Siren, and UBER.

Mason uses the @error property:

{
  "@error": {
    "@id": "b2613385-a3b2-47b7-b336-a85ac405bc66",
    "@message": "There was a problem with one or more input values.",
    "@code": "INVALIDINPUT"
  }
}

The existing error properties are compatible with Problem Details for HTTP APIs, and they can be extended.

Siren doesn’t have a specific structure for errors, but we can easily model errors with the existing structures:

{
  "class": [
    "error"
  ],
  "properties": {
    "id": "b2613385-a3b2-47b7-b336-a85ac405bc66",
    "message": "There was a problem with one or more input values.",
    "code": "INVALIDINPUT"
  }
}

We can even go a step further and use entities to add detailed sub-errors. This would be very useful for validation errors, for instance, where you can report all errors to the client at once. We could also use the existing actions property to include a retry action. And we could use the error properties from Problem Details for HTTP APIs.

UBER has an explicit error structure:

{
  "uber": {
    "version": "1.0",
    "error": {
      "data": [
        { "name": "id", "value": "b2613385-a3b2-47b7-b336-a85ac405bc66" },
        { "name": "message", "value": "There was a problem with one or more input values." },
        { "name": "code", "value": "INVALIDINPUT" }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Again, we could reuse the error properties from Problem Details for HTTP APIs.

Conclusion

My advice would be to use the error structure of your existing media type and use the extensibility features to steal all the good ideas from Problem Details for HTTP APIs.