InvisibleJob

From APIDesign

Current revision

Chapter 14 describes that supervising the development of an API is a difficult task. First of all, a good API architect has to be like a Cassandra:

• always seeing possible failures
• always knowing what might go wrong in the future
• always proclaiming warnings of danger

Supervision is especially needed when design is done in a group. The better the architect you are working with, the further into the future the architect needs to be able to see. However, this creates a problem that makes the task particularly tricky. People only take notice when something goes wrong:

• when customers become upset by incompatibilities
• when they refuse to migrate to a new version
• when then switch to competitive offerings

However, if everything works as it should, then nothing happens, and it’s difficult to present nothing as a big success. The situation is comparable to that of security agencies. Until a plane is hijacked and destroyed, nobody likes the work of security agents. People complain about the security checks at airports, which seem complicated and unnecessary.

Without a catastrophe, it all seems to be overkill. However, after the disaster it’s too late to fix anything.

Boosting up GraalVM Security

As such, I am always thankful for situations like the one during my fifth year duty at OracleLabs. When you can predict future problems, address them and then a hacking attack proves you were right, then you deserve to be called an architect, I believe!