Day: April 21, 2018

Google has been really moving forward with their development, and storytelling around gRPC. Their high speed to approach to doing APIs that uses HTTP/2 as a transport, and protocol buffers (ProtoBuf) as its serialized message format. Even with all this motion forward they aren’t leaving everyone doing basic web APIs behind, and are actively supporting both approaches across all new Google APIs, as well as in their services and tooling for deploying APIs in the Google Cloud – supporting two-speed APIs side-by-side, across their platform.

When you are using Google Cloud Endpoints to deploy and manage your APIs, you can choose to offer a more RESTful edition, as well as a more advanced gRPC edition. They’ve continued to support this approach across their service features, and tooling, by now also documenting your APIs. As part of their rollout of a supporting API portal and documentation for your Google Cloud Endpoints, you can automatically document both flavors of your APIs. Making a strong case for considering to offer both types of APIs, depending on the types of use cases you are looking to solve, and the types of developers you are catering to. https://goo.gl/MLjuxa #DataIntegration #ML

ICYDK: This is a story, in a series of stories that I’m doing as part of the version 3.0 release of the Stoplight.io platform. Stoplight.io is one the few API service providers I’m excited about when it comes to what they are delivering in the API space, so I jumped at the opportunity to do some paid work for them. As I do, I’m working to make these stories about the solutions they provide and refrain from focusing on just their product, hopefully maintaining my independent stance as the API Evangelist, and keeping some of the credibility I’ve established over the years.

GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket have taken up a central role in the delivery of the valuable API resources we are using across our web, mobile, and device-based applications. These platforms have become integral parts of our development, and software build processes, with GitHub being the most prominent player when it comes to defining how we deliver not just applications, but increasingly API-driven applications on the web, our mobile phones, and common Internet-connected objects becoming more ubiquitous across our physical worlds. https://goo.gl/yCDZPW #DataIntegration #ML

ICYMI: I’ve occasionally needed to extract text and/or images from a PDF. I’ve found a couple of easy, free ways to do this on MacOS.

There’s commercial software such as Adobe Acrobat that will extract images from a PDF, of course, but there’s an easier way: a free application called The Unarchiver that treats a PDF file as if it were a zip file and extracts everything into a folder. Just install the app, then right-click on a PDF file, and select Open With. https://goo.gl/gii3Vs #DataIntegration #ML