Leonard Richardson > Quotes

“The term “statelessness” is getting at the fact that the server doesn’t care what state the client is in.”
― Leonard Richardson, RESTful Web APIs: Services for a Changing World

“thinking of API design as resource design is a very effective way to avoid thinking about hypermedia.”
― Leonard Richardson, RESTful Web APIs: Services for a Changing World

“They wanted us to change," said Tetsuo. "They came to our planet and they wouldn't shut up about fluid overlays and unhierarchical forms of social organization. We felt like we had to listen to them, because they were so powerful. But secretly we thought of them as monsters from space. And now here we are at your planet, and we are the monsters from space." "Why'd you come here? Why even bother?" "Don't you want to be a monster from space, too?”
― Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games

“You are employed by a suspicious number of douchebags!”
― Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games

“Do human software games have directors?" said Tetsuo. "Like movies?" "Yeah," I said, "if they're real pretentious, like Weapon Eternal." "Af be Hui was the director of A Tower of Sand," said Tetsuo. "She became well-known. High-status. She made seven other games and her games changed history a little bit. I think we should play more of her work." "To what purpose? Did she finally get the Ip Shkoy to calm down about the Constellation?" Ashley wriggled violently and Tetsuo crawled off of her tail. "Purpose?" said Tetsuo. "What is purpose? History is not a trash compactor where you lost something important. You have to spend some time there.”
― Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games

“Historians and paleontologists have a great rivalry," said Tetsuo. "Most contact missions arrive too late, after history has ended. The people we wanted to contact have wiped themselves out. The historians have to put on pith helmets and learn how to dig up fossils." "But you're not fossils," said Ashley. "And so, the historians win!" said Tetsuo. "This time, the paleontologists have to learn about inefficient hierarchical systems of social organization!”
― Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games

“Smoke-ccss-b85b07: Tell me about a time when you did something evil. ABlum: oh gee well sometimes i work too hard is that evil? Smoke-ccssb85b07: Sarcasm ignored. ABlum: ok um when i started college, my brother raph pressured me to join the ut austin chapter of his fraternity and i joined, only to discover that fraternities are the stupidest forms of social organization ever invented so, live and learn but at the end of the fall semester, one of my frat brothers offered to pay me to write his final history paper and i did it but i didn't want to get caught, so i read his earlier papers and put a lot of work into imitating his shitty writing which made the paper a d+ at best so he failed the class and i wouldn't give the money back so they made up an honor code violation and kicked me out of the frat and at the time i remember thinking "this has worked out surprisingly well" so, i don't know what you consider "evil" but i'm sure you can find it somewhere in there”
― Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games

“a good way to make some cash without worrying about boring things like originality or operating capital.”
― Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games

“I've been working for other people my whole life, and all they do is ignore my ideas. That's if I'm lucky. If I'm not lucky, they ruin my ideas and then make me”
― Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games

“it seems we’ve got a mental block when it comes to hypermedia in web APIs. This is a big problem, because hypermedia is the feature that makes a web API capable of handling changes gracefully.”
― Leonard Richardson, RESTful Web APIs: Services for a Changing World

“the “API call” metaphor inevitably exposes the server’s implementation details to the clients. This introduces coupling between server code and client code.”
― Leonard Richardson, RESTful Web APIs: Services for a Changing World

“The things you’re accustomed to are dangerous. In applications intended for use within an organization, a design based on API calls works well and is easy to develop. The API call metaphor assumes away the network boundary and lets a client invoke a method on a remote computer just like it would call the API of a local code library.”
― Leonard Richardson, RESTful Web APIs: Services for a Changing World

“While there is a lower class, I am in it.” — Eugene Debs”
― Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games

“And it's nighttime," said Jenny. She sighed. "I'm going home.”
― Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games

“in a hypermedia-based design, resources don’t matter as much. The designer’s job is to identify all the state transitions.”
― Leonard Richardson, RESTful Web APIs: Services for a Changing World

“I just have a slight fear of being a tiny speck in the infinite cosmic void.”
― Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games

“We make a product and sell it. How hard can it be? Every douchebag either one of us has ever worked for has managed to do this!”
― Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games

“A maze of softly-lit slightly-curved beige hallways, all alike.”
― Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games

“You weren't using the moon for anything. Only some long-term robot storage.”
― Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games

“URLs don’t even need to make sense to human eyes. But we humans prefer nice-looking URLs, like”
― Leonard Richardson, RESTful Web APIs: Services for a Changing World

“Don't be a guy who feels bad," said Tetsuo. "Nobody ever knows what to do. Our life-task is to decide what to do.”
― Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games