This post is for people who have started learning about hypermedia and feel that it over complicates the elegance of REST. When I started hearing about hypermedia I felt it was adding architecture acrobatics for the sake of buzzword enhancement. After having applied these techniques in a few places not only have a drunk the cool aid, I’ve setup a stand beside my desk. I look back and try to understand where my initial negative reaction came from. I realized that many of the examples were trivial and did not demonstrate the reality of what hypermedia brings to the table. ...

I’m using a hosted version of JIRA and needed to obtain quick totals based on filters that I have setup. I could not find any easy documentation online so I thought I’d share my quick hack. The REST API is very well documented and uses the same JQL as the filters do. In order to view the commit list for an iteration I have some JQL that looks like: fixversion = 20120611 and fixversion was 20120611 ON “2012/06/11” AND status NOT IN (canceled, “on hold”) ...

It’s a month past due so here is my obligatory “I changed my job” post. Over the last nearly 8 years at Comcast as part of the ‘Online’ group and later as founding member of mighty Comcast Interactive Media I’ve made many business connections, met a number of excellent peers and forged a few relationships that will last a lifetime. As a happily married 40+ dad with mortgage and college payments I often feel over the hill with regards to blogging and living out loud. As a Manager with a sometimes disproportional ego I also felt an obligation to ‘disappear’ for some time in order to give @tomjbarker room to make the team his own. I’ve no doubt that he will take what we started to the next level. ...

This weekend I attended a gallery opening of an exhibition called ‘50 Americans’ featuring the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. Usually I have to spend the first few minutes or an Art exhibition reading the background to understand the story that the gallery is telling through the art. This one was different. Rather then view the Mapplethorpe images through the lens of an expert Sean Kelly’s people found 50 Americans, one per state, to curate the selection. They were nervous about what selections the wisdom of the crowd would choose to surface. Some people involved with the Mapplethorpe foundation were initially skeptical of the project. ...

On Monday we are kicking off an innovation week (more to come on that topic) and I’ve devised a little project that includes nearly every buzzword I’m interested in. I’m spending some time doing some technical spikes to see what is possible and I found a need to load a particular file from a git repo given the path and tree hash. I grabbed my trusty python, dulwich (native python-git library) and gave it a shot. After a few minutes writing complicated looking recursive code I jumped over to irc where the friendly author pointed me to a convenience function that does what I needed. ...