- AI
- ambiguity
- APIs
- architecture
- augmented reality
- books
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- Christmas
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- complexity
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Now you’re thinking with . . .
Christmas is a time for play, so let’s talk about a game. If you haven’t played the video game Portal, then I suggest that you stop reading this article and go and play it.
Welcome back. Did you play Portal 2 as well? If not, go and play that one as well: it’s even better.
If you didn’t take my advice, then you’ve missed out on a great experience. (Maybe you should go and try it - we’ll wait.) I believe that the Portal games are examples of just how good video gaming can be: intriguing, playful, thoughtful and challenging, with a sparse but engaging story.
In the games, you are a subject in a lab, and you have one tool to pass a series of strange and dangerous tests: a portal gun. When fired, this gun creates a hole on a surface, and when fired again, it creates a hole on another surface. If you jump through one hole, you come out of the other - it’s a portal! The games are an exercise in creativity on top of this simple premise, by both the developers and the players.
For good APIs, legacy systems need an attitude adjustment
Why is opening up legacy systems using APIs still so hard?
As IT architects, we tend to focus on the technical reasons: data formats, protocols, messaging capabilities and so on.
I believe that we should also focus on another reason: our legacy systems have an attitude problem.
Do systems really have an attitude? Most of them can’t talk (yet), but imagine if they could. The batch, COBOL, mainframe systems I wrote in my first coding job might have sounded something like this:
"I don’t talk to other programs. I’m not even sure whether they really exist. All that I know is that once I day I wake up, I take that pile of data over there, I do some stuff to it, and I move it over there."