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REST

• Who is Roy Fielding?

  He is a person that helped to write (HTTP) as the first web servers, that sent documents across the internet… and then he did a ton of research explaining why the web works the way it does. His name is on the specification for the protocol that is used to get pages from servers to your browser.

• Why don’t the techniques that we use today work well when we need to be able to talk to all of the machines in the world?

  Because they weren’t designed to be used like that. When Fielding and his colleagues started building the web, being able to talk to any machine anywhere in the world was a primary concern. But most of the techniques developers later used to get computers to talk to each other didn’t have those requirements.

• What is the HTTP protocol that Fielding and his friends created?

  “http” like the beginning of what we type into the browser. Because it is capable of describing the location of something anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world. It’s the foundation of the web. The whole world wide web is built on an architectural style called “REST”. REST provides a definition of a “resource”, which is what those things point to.

• What does a GET do?

  The web page just specifies the URLs to the images and the browser goes and does more GETs using the HTTP protocol on them until all the resources are obtained and the web page is displayed. But the important thing here is that very different kinds of nouns can be treated the same. Whether the noun is an image, text, video, an mp3, a slideshow, whatever.

• What does a POST do?

  POST is used by HTTP to add something from one system to another system

• What does PUT do?

  PUT is used by HTTP to help a system wants to replace something in another system

• What does PATCH do?

  PATCH is used by HTTP to help a system to do a partial update. The only thing left to figure out is what the data models should look like.

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team

• Yet many of today’s most valuable firms have come to realize that analyzing and improving individual workers ­— a practice known as ‘‘employee performance optimization’’ — isn’t enough. As commerce becomes increasingly global and complex, the bulk of modern work is more and more team-based
• software engineers are encouraged to work together, in part because studies show that groups tend to innovate faster, see mistakes more quickly and find better solutions to problems.
• it was almost impossible to find patterns — or any evidence that the composition of a team made any difference.
• Team members may behave in certain ways as individuals — they may chafe against authority or prefer working independently — but when they gather, the group’s norms typically override individual proclivities and encourage deference to the team.
• After looking at over a hundred groups for more than a year, Project Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google’s teams.
• The only way to maximize the group’s score was for each person to sacrifice an item they really wanted for something the team needed. Some groups easily divvied up the buying; others couldn’t fill their shopping carts because no one was willing to compromise.
• The right norms could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.
• As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined
• the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues.
• there are few exchanges of the kind of personal information that lets teammates pick up on what people are feeling or leaving unsaid. There’s a good chance the members of Team A will continue to act like individuals once they come together, and there’s little to suggest that, as a group, they will become more collectively intelligent
• ‘We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘‘who’’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.’
• There were other behaviors that seemed important as well — like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability. But Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.
• establishing psychological safety is, by its very nature, somewhat messy and difficult to implement. You can tell people to take turns during a conversation and to listen to one another more. You can instruct employees to be sensitive to how their colleagues feel and to notice when someone seems upset. But the kinds of people who work at Google are often the ones who became software engineers because they wanted to avoid talking about feelings in the first place.
• The behaviors that create psychological safety — conversational turn-taking and empathy — are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond. And those human bonds matter as much at work as anywhere else. In fact, they sometimes matter more.
• ‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well. But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’
• to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency.
• In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.