With messaging systems trying to satiate information-hungry users, it’s fascinating to see how standards are popping up around the decades old infrastructure of the internet. I’m talking, of course, about the meta tags and their evolution, or lack thereof. When sharing links on popular platforms, the new standard is to show a preview of the link so that users can know what they’re about to click on. Facebook introduced a new standard to help unify sites around the web and make information more easily scrape-able. Since then, there have been more standards added on to the age-old infrastructure of meta tags.
Story 2 – Serverless Architecture
A quite fascinating and paradigm-shifting technology is peeking its head on a lot of cloud platforms: serverless/Functions as a Service (FaaS). The possibilities that this technology opens up are not only quite endless, but also pretty darn cool. The premise is that one can deploy a simple function and only pay for the length of time that the function took to complete running. This is a great addition to micro-services and can instantly lower an API’s costs. Since well-designed API’s are stateless anyway, one doesn’t need a server constantly up, but only spun up as needed. It’s easy to see that FaaS can very easily turn API hosting on its head. And given my great interest in backend architecture and API design, I’ve been itching for a good excuse to play around with serverless architecture.
Story 3 – The Convergence
Meet Better Meta, the API that allows you to quickly and easily fetch any site’s meta tags in a digest-able JSON format, built on AWS’ Lambda. Better Meta is the perfect example of an API that can run simply in AWS Lambda with minimal resources and provide valuable information in a readable format for other developers to use in their applications. This allowed me to play with Lambda and get a feel for the serverless world and API’s, work with XPath (the scraping needs to be done somewhere, right?), study a bit of the history of the internet and evolution of meta tags, and of course, provide a valuable resource for fellow developers. Happy meta tagging!