Phil Sturgeon
Belfast
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bitcoin/crypto, london tech scene, business improvement, cryptocurrency, bitcoin, business
Asian whisky enthusiast. Gamer. Hip and/or Hop head.
Articles by Phil Sturgeon
What is X-Forwarded-For and when can you trust it?
The X-Forwarded-For (XFF) HTTP header provides crucial insight into the origin of web requests. The header works as a mechanism for conveying the original source IP addresses of clients, and not just across one hop, but through chains of multiple intermediaries. This list of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses is helpful to understand where requests have really come from in scenarios where they traverse several servers, proxies, or load balancers.
Why is Dale Vince Lying About Heat Pumps?
Dale Vince is the owner of Ecotricity, which claims to be “Britain’s greenest energy supplier”, selling renewable electricity and greenwashed fossil gas. Dale has fallen out with swathes of the climate community lately by campaigning against the Greens in their main target seats, even Bristol, suggesting “the only party that can form a green government” was Labour, with many suggesting this was part of a larger effort to get into the House of Lords.
Working with the new Idempotency Keys RFC (Sponsored by HTTP Toolkit)
Idempotency is when doing an operation multiple times is guaranteed to have the same effect as doing it just once. When working with APIs this is exceptionally helpful on slow or unreliable internet connections, or when dealing with particularly sensitive actions such as payments, because it makes retrying operations safe and reliable.
Struggling to Balance Charity Work and Income
I co-found Protect Earth in 2020 and none of us knew how big it would become. We started planting on a single farm, and since then we've planted with sixty different landowners, purchased 140 acres of land, and leased more, so that we can maximise our impact in the fight against the climate and biodiversity crises.
Turn HTTP Traffic into OpenAPI with Optic
This article is sponsored by Optic, in that they're paying for our time to review the tool, but they're not paying for what we write. If it's rubbish we'll let you know. Documenting an API with OpenAPI can take a long time when you're starting from scratch. Some API developers use the API Design-first strategy to make their OpenAPI first, then they use that to easily make mocks and docs.
Increase farm productivity and profitability with agroforestry & rewilding — Protect Earth
Agriculture and conservation have been at odds for too long, but sustainable agriculture and rewilding are an overlapping venn diagram, which can improve crop yields, and increase farm profitability. Many conservation groups preach about reclaiming land from farmers, but the only thing that’ll make a real difference to the future of the planet is cooperation.
Contract Testing a Laravel API with OpenAPI
Your API does a bunch of great stuff, and your OpenAPI document tells everyone about all the great stuff that your API can do, but making sure those two sources of truth agree can be a bit of a struggle at first.
Opening Up About Open-Source October: Time to Give Back!
Get Involved with Our Open-Source Initiatives & Giving Back This October, we’re celebrating open source. Yes, we have open-source tools, but let's also celebrate what open source means to the API community. “APIs would not be nearly as pervasive as they are without the impact of the open-source developer community.
Kristan 'Krispy' Uccello
Data makes the world go around so they say. In this article I detail how I use Prisma with Nx to maintain my data models. It is an approach that keeps the model isolated from the underlying “implementation details” and keeps me sane when things in the model need to change.
There’s No Reason to Write OpenAPI By Hand
Some API developers use API descriptions to plan the interface of an API before building it, which is known as the “API design first” workflow. Others build the API then generate (or manually produce) API descriptions later, which is the “code-first” workflow. We wrote API Design-first vs Code-first recently to help get you up to speed on the differences, but how do you actually create these API descriptions?
Useful API Errors for REST, GraphQL and gRPC
Dealing with the Happy Path™ in an API is pretty easy: When a client asks for a resource, show them the resource. When they trigger a procedure, let them know if it was triggered OK, and maybe if it completed without a problem. What to do when something doesn’t go according to plan? Well, that can be tricky. HTTP status codes are part of the picture, they can define a category of issue, but they are never going to explain the whole story.
Picking the right API Paradigm
A while back I wrote an article called Understanding RPC, REST and GraphQL which outlined the "what" in how these various approaches differ. This got a few people thinking I was saying REST was drastically superior in all ways, which is a common conclusion when folks hear me describe REST as a layer of abstractions on top of RPC… More abstractions does not mean definitively "better", sometimes that's going to be overkill, so let's look at when you might want to use which.
Taking a Timeout from Poor Performance
Our Featured Guest Series is back! In this post, Phil Sturgeon warns about ripple effects that can take out entire applications, through making HTTP calls to unstable systems. Learn about using timeouts, retries, and circuit breakers to avoid this happening to you! If you're interested in contributing to the Runscope blog, go to blog.runscope.com/writing for more information. In a system-oriented architecture, it is crucial to communicate with other systems.
Design-first API Specification Workflow Matures
Back in October I wrote Chasing the Perfect API Specification Workflow, which was a huge article about the state of the API specification world. One person trying to figure out a good workflow, in a sea of alternative specifications, with incomplete tooling, making it hard to see a solution for all the partial bits of functionality. RAML and API Blueprint fell short of my requirements very quickly, and OpenAPI v3 was not available at the time of writing.
A Response to REST is the new SOAP | Phil Sturgeon
Enough people have asked me about the article REST is the new SOAP that I felt it justifies a write up. Before I get started, I want to be clear that I hold no grudge against the author, and if any frustration leaks out in my writing I'd like to apologize in advance. The entire article is full of common misunderstandings about REST and HTTP. Despite dedicating my career to trying to educate people through these confusions, they continue to be rife.
You Might Not Need GraphQL
Comically, all of these concepts (type systems, schemas, metadata in general, etc.) is exactly what most people hated about SOAP. Instead of just the payload, you had to mess about with a WSDL, and that lead folks to enjoy REST. Well, in REST, using something like JSON Schema, you have the choice of using them, as do your clients. Aren't interested in JSON? Look into Protocol Buffers like ProtoBuff or Cap'n Proto .
Understanding RPC Vs REST For HTTP APIs — Smashing Magazine
12 min read Coding, Tools, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails Share on Twitter, LinkedIn Quick summary ↬ For the last few years, whenever somebody wants to start building an HTTP API, they pretty much exclusively use REST as the go-to architectural style, over alternative approaches such as XML-RPC, SOAP and JSON-RPC. REST is made out by many to be ultimately superior to the other “RPC-based” approaches, which is a bit misleading because they are just different.
T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM v Sanity
Anyone who has mentioned PHP Fractal of Bad Design to me knows I don’t give it much credit. It’s a list of complaints about loose-typing in general, some “it’s not Python” rants, lots of complaints about bugs that have been fixed, suggestions PHP doesn’t have features which it has had for years and a few examples of quirks that need to be worked on.
Save Blackswarth Road Wood (Crew's Hole)
by Phil Sturgeon in Bristol, Bristol City, United Kingdom £80,000 stretch target 27 days left 153% 1084 supporters Your donation will release extra funding This project will only be funded if at least £40,000 is pledged by 13th September 2023 at 5:00pm To buy five-acres of mature woodland in Crew's Hole, Bristol, for the long-term benefit of the community, wildlife and the climate.
Creating a wildlife refuge in the Wilder Marshes
Please help Protect Earth raise the funds to purchase 20 acres of land near Knighton, just down the road from one of our largest woodland creation and habitat restoration projects in Lloyney, known as Goytre Hill, soon to be Goytre Wood. More about Goytre Wood (English, Welsh). The plan for this land would be to naturally regenerate some sections and plant some sections as appropriate, keeping some areas open around the ponds to increase benefits for wildlife.
Create a community woodland on the River Avon
You did it. Our solicitors have been busily working away on getting the paperwork sorted out, and we're ironing out the remaining paperwork for the various bits of funding to get this done. We still need your help getting the crowdfunder to the stretch goal of £100,000 as we're onto the backup plan with the rest of our funding. We're trying to complete the purchase this December so there's no time to waste.
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