Abstractions, Ejector Seats and Escape Hatches: Designing Your API to Fail
Details
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7:00 PM "Abstractions, Ejector Seats and Escape Hatches: Designing Your API to Fail" -- Meredydd Luff
Every time we write code, we build abstractions. And here's the bad news: Your API design isn't perfect. Whatever abstraction you create, it will leak, and it will fail. I don't mean throwing errors; I mean something worse: building an API that doesn't allow what your users need to do.
Meredydd has this problem big-style as the founder Anvil , which aims to simplify web development by letting you build everything in Python - including the UI and browser-side code. It's a challenge: the existing HTML/JS/CSS/framework ecosystem is fiendishly complex, and so huge to cover everything in a nice, Pythonic API - however carefully it's designed.
So we need to design our APIs to fail - and to fail well. In this talk, Meredydd will ask, "What is an abstraction, and how does it fail?". With examples from the Python world and beyond, he'll talk about what happens when an abstraction prevents your users from doing what they need. Do they go down with the ship? Can they eject? Or can you build them a real escape hatch?
7:45 PM Lightning talks / Announcements
TBD, please contact the organisers if you'd like to participate.