I am here today to chew bubblegum and write about technology, cake, and death. I appear to be all out of bubblegum, however, so it is time to move on and write about why I think the question of “Cake or death?” is not only related, but relevant to, a discussion about technology.
First, let me give credit where credit is due. One of my favorite stand-up comedians, Eddie Izzard, does a great bit that asks the question, “Cake or death?” I caught one of his performances the other night, tuning in right about the point where he did his “Cake or death?” bit.
“Cake or death?” That’s a pretty easy question. Anyone could [...]

“Well, the problem is that SOAP is hard.”
It’s early 2007 and I’m dead in the middle of a conversation with a friend at PayPal.
“We were certain that developers accessing the eBay product data would want everything in SOAP and it just made sense to do it that way. It wasn’t right, though. Turns out, SOAP is hard.”
This is neither the first nor the last time I’d find myself submerged in the ‘what-counts-as-too-hard for data access?’ conversation, or the ‘so-who-are-our-users-REALLY?’ conversation that’s never too far behind. Every year sees the addition of yet more developers working in yet more languages inside of even more frameworks than ever before. And the unspoken corollary [...]