Adaptation, Ouroboros, and APIs
Prologue
While there are conflicting stories behind it, I contend that in J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel, The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins is both the narrator and writer of the story; we are reading There And Back Again. Furthermore, The Lord of the Rings saga is written by Bilbo and Frodo (with help from Sam and the stories of the elves and dwarves). We’re being told (and retold) stories from unreliable, biased narrators. The events that unfold, taken as real events, may have been very different from their presented story.
Tolkien certainly conceived of events outside of these stories— in some early revisions of The Hobbit, Gollum willingly bets The Ring on Bilbo’s riddle contest. Later, Tolkien suggests that Bilbo’s telling of the riddle contest is actually a flat out lie, concocted under the influence of the ring.
Tolkien rewrote and adapted from both several times over, as writers are wont to do. Influenced by structures, themes, battles, and characters from an array of Norse mythology and other books, Tolkien continued a tradition of adapting patterns, improving on them, and created new byproducts that later influenced both his work and others. Later editions of The Hobbit were revised to accommodate the new Lord of the Rings stories; their interfaces were now incompatible.
Stephen King does something very similar in his seven-novel Dark Tower opus (itself adapted in part from Robert Browning’s poem, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came). Like Tolkien, later in the series he went back to the first novel, The Gunslinger, revising it to fit the paradigm and changes he made over the years continuing the story (and created an ouroboros, an API-related subject I’ll cover in another post). It’s no surprise that King was heavily influenced by Tolkien in this series.
Opposition to Peter Jackson’s film adaptions of The Lord of the Rings, and, especially, The Hobbit is interesting. Carrying Tolkien’s tradition, Jackson and Fran Walsh revisit these stories from new perspectives: no longer are we limited to Bilbo and Sam and Frodo’s narrative biases! We meet dwarves with personality, strengthen the bonds between elves and men, go to and understand the horrors of war, and, yes, see all new embellishments and perhaps new characters we had not known as well before. But like Tolkien often did, these are the same stories told from new perspectives. Does it matter than a short book was turned into three films? No, because Jackson is adapting a core story, not Bilbo’s There And Back Again.
We see this again in The Children of Húrin, a posthumously released novel co-written by Christopher Tolkien. The story was told in short form in The Silmarillion, as a narrative poem, and other revisions told it from different perspectives. The novel form is told as an epic great tragedy. In each telling, they are stylistically different, especially from the more familiar Ring-oriented books.
One API To Rule Them All
Why am I going on about fantasy literature when I usually talk about APIs and platforms? As API authors and technologists, we sell ourselves short by avoiding versioning and revisions. We strive to create our greatest works, promising not to break them with our new work. We argue whether the API is the narrator or the story itself. Whether our data can be adapted for new media, by rogue directors with a new perspective. Sometimes we’re overzealous in looking back at our nordic antecedents, trying to conform to structures unsuitable for our data and our customers. And we worry about design patterns and interoperability.
API customers expect us to have one ring to rule them all, to carry them to Mordor like eagles, and to never introduce an anachronism. We treat a terms of service change as a mortal wound from a Nazgul blade instead of as an opportunity to collect Athelas. There are reasons—good reasons—for this, but nonetheless they are perhaps inhuman. Humans adapt. They eat their experience (and other’s experience) to create new experiences. Designing APIs only for machines loses something. Expecting them to behave only like machines limits innovation and creativity, and invites their adoption into the legal structures of copyright and patent. Of course, creative works like Tolkien’s were also subject to copyright, so there’s a fine line.
How do we design APIs to be adaptable and revisable? To create new works we haven’t imagined? We set strong foundations. We write them from many customer perspectives and personas. User.json as a symbol from the collective unconscious, the Arthurian Legend. We explain and assist, but also invite new adaptations and new possibilities. We introduce constraints that inspire creative solutions.
The Hobbit was told by Bilbo, but it could have been told by the elves or dwarves, too. As an API designer, try to imagine how the story will be told by a CRM, analytics, or an advertising agency. As an API consumer use your imagination and think of a story beyond the one you’re reading.
Products are a dialog between customer and provider. If APIs are to be treated as products, then their offerings need to be able to adapt and change according to their customer’s needs. While the nature of the customer is very different than say a pack of Oreos, we need to find some middle ground where this can occur while inconveniencing the least amount of people.
It’s a long walk to Mordor, but we’ve given you a wizard as a guide, and you have a strong fellowship. Feel free to call the eagles if you can find a way to contact them. A thriving ecosystem finds a way.
