Dilettante’s Ball

Ariadne #48 includes “Introducing unAPI“, written by Dan, Jeremy, Peter, Michael, Mike, Ed and me. It explains the potential of unAPI and shows some examples on implementations.

Like the last article I “wrote” with this group, I didn’t have to do much. On the flipside, publishing has such a minute effect (if any) on my career, I guess the “effort” reflects the “rewards”.

Still, this one was tough. A refactoring of the Umlaut broke the unAPI interface right about the time the editors were going over the example cases in the article. It was extremely difficult to put development cycles into this when I had a ton of other things I desperately needed to get completed before the start of the semester.

And that’s where the struggle is. While I’m completely sold on the “potential” of unAPI, that’s all it is right now. COinS was much easier concept for me get behind (although I would definitely say I have invested more in unAPI than COinS) since it’d be so much easier to implement on both the information provider and client ends. UnAPI is a much, much more difficult sell. However, the payoff is so much greater, one has to have faith and sometimes dedicate time that should probably have been spent on more immediate needs.