Development

Re-Implementing the Google Reader API in 2025

Over Christmas, I decided to finally tackle learning Elixir. Since I learn new programming languages best by actually building something, I set out to implement a simple RSS reader/sync service, similar to Miniflux and FreshRSS. Since I actually want to use this app, it needs to have a way to connect to my client apps (Reeder 5/Classic on iOS and macOS, as well as NewsFlash on Linux). Since the Google Reader API implementation is well-supported in most RSS clients, I set out to build an API compatible with the existing spec.

Thoughts on API design in a world of carelessness

The company I’m working at provides eCommerce solutions for many years now. A few years ago we decided to give up on our own product and started to become an agency that would work with a existing eCommerce application from now on. In our own software, we provided a SOAP API which hadn’t changed for years that had some client-side implementations in various ERP systems and when we switched over, we decided to provide a compatibility plugin for the new software that would expose the SOAP facade we built years ago and translate all requests to the REST API (which we called internally without going over HTTP again).