Introduction

This article expands on Part I and Part II of this series (covering schema, security, and type definitions) with the creation of a REST API framework that will facilitate development of REST endpoints.

The framework is designed to reduce boilerplate code, allow for ease of maintenance and feature development, and integrate with underlying features developed in PL/pgSQL. Common requirements such as REST URL parsing, serialization, and authentication are built into classes that can either be extended to leverage functionality, or applied to methods on other classes to change the input, output, or other behavior using annotations.

This approach leverages concepts…

What is Success?

To get an idea of what a successful mindset is, a root concept of “success” must be defined. This is different for everyone, but for simplicity we will define a basic set of requirements:

1. The freedom to make one’s own choices in every aspect of one’s life
2. Possession of whatever resources are necessary to facilitate #1

If you ask a few people around Earth to describe their ideal life, there is a good chance it fits the description above. Many people want a beautiful house, a nice car, maybe a farm, garden, shop, or other kind of property to engage…

Kaixo!

The language of the Basques, called Euskara, is spoken by about 700,000 people around the world, primarily around the Bay of Biscay in the area between NW Spain and SW France, known as the Basque Country. There are several dialects, each with unique properties that reflect the local culture, along with a standardized form called batua developed by the Basque Language Academy in the 1960's.

Euskara is an agglunative ergative-absolutive language in which syllables are “glued” together to create words on-the-fly that describe agents, in a manner that is often loosely compared to subject-object verb order. Examples of other agglunative…

Within the span of 20 years, social media has grown from the hobby of a small group of enthusiasts to a part of everyday life for billions of people. Occasionally, we hear about a data breach or even a corporate transaction in which our personal data was shared with others, and many people are surprised at how such a thing could happen so often.

We use these apps and services because we want to stay connected with others, informed, and entertained. …

Introduction

In the previous article of this series, we looked at the underlying SQL schema for the social network demo with built-in security and privacy features. In this article, we will examine the next phase in the bottom-up design of this application: the data model library.

By defining models in a common library, integrity can be maintained between the data models and the underlying DB schema in one convenient location, allowing any number of components in the future to be built, with compile-time type safety for increased reliability.

The data models reflect the schema as expected, and provide convenient methods for…

Success is Work

When we think of success, we often think of the products of success, such as having a lot of money or having the freedom to travel at will and see new places. While these things are great and are indeed a part of success, that’s not all there is to it, and it wouldn’t mean much to succeed without the work behind it and understanding why it’s important.

True success comes having the desire and passion to go after something and work at it endlessly until the desired results are achieved, and then continue working at it to get increasingly…

Introduction

Social networks have become a part of daily life for many people around the world today. In this article, we will check out the first step in the design of a very basic social network: creating the database schema.

A social network is a perfect use case for bottom-up design, since we can define security and required behaviors in a robust and scalable way. This allows future upgrades to be largely non-breaking while being relatively easy to implement and maintain.

This social network will feature standard email/password authentication, uploading images, setting a profile photo, posting content (with optional image), and…

“I’m gonna be really successful someday…”

I’ve always told myself this in times of turmoil and unrest, such as a soul-shaking career or relationship change, and while it’s great to have big aspirations in life, there’s only one problem with this statement: just when is someday going to come? And besides that, what does “being successful” really mean, anyway?

Okay, that’s two problems, and that just further illustrates my point. What exactly is this elusive target off in the distance, and would I even know what it looks like?

This sort of thinking will always hold you back in life…