Human API Negotiation
I was working on the start of a data reconciliation problem yesterday, wandering around the office talking to various people who know the data and where it comes from, how up-to-date it is and who updates it.
Whilst my colleagues were talking I had an out-of-office experience and watched while they negotiated an agreement about the edges of the problem. As they were disussing the interfaces between one company’s process and another, it seemed like trying to spec an API. It made me wonder if there’s some kind of interprocess negotiation protocol that could be developed, or perhaps already exists.
I meet this problem again and again, and rather than fix it each time I end up trying to analyse the patterns. Perhaps I should just get on with it.