DEV Community: Vratislav Kopp

Let's stop wasting time

Vratislav Kopp — Thu, 12 May 2022 13:08:54 +0000

I've known our founder Zdeněk for almost 20 years now. He probably won’t remember, but there is one particular conversation that strongly affected my decision to join Superface years after it had happened.

It must have been around 2012. Zdeněk had just resigned from his job, likely not knowing he would join Apiary a couple of months later, changing the course of his career and ultimately leading to Superface being born. We were standing in front of a bar in Prague, and he was telling me how a whole generation of the most brilliant brains gets wasted. People become software engineers and designers to change the world, only to spend careers in meaningless corporate jobs, doing repetitive work, building software nobody needs.

This strongly resonated with me. I don't claim to possess a brilliant brain, but I’ve always looked for meaning in my work. Apparently, I was looking in all the wrong places.

Tried corporate, was bored, worked in agencies and founded one, burnt out, took a break to gain energy, joined a startup, ran out of money, found a secure job, was bored again. I worked on countless projects the world could do without, and wanted to break the cycle.

Then Zdeněk approached me with the idea behind Superface. At first, I thought, nah. A developer tool to make nerds nerdier. Whatever. But then, after a couple of days, the scene from 2012 came back to me.

In 2020, when we had just embarked on the Superface journey, the estimated cost of API work was 80 billion USD. That's 1.5x the cost of getting the mankind to Mars.

Convert it to developer hours, and you’ll see we're talking about thousands of people spending their best years making machines talk to each other by integrating APIs and maintaining the connections. A big part of the wasted time Zdeněk was talking about.

Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

I’m not a developer myself, but I do have my share of experience with APIs. Once, I was a part of a project where the company responsible for backend development almost went bankrupt, and several people resigned solely because they underestimated how tough it would be to integrate with the main vendor’s API. I have quite a few stories like this, unfortunately.

Integrating the same APIs over and over again and trying to figure out how to integrate new ones usually ate up a serious part of the budget. When I worked at agencies, the development time we sold to do API integrations was an important part of our income. But constantly reinventing the wheel would inevitably start to feel like a waste of time and potential for both our developers and clients.

Realizing all this, I knew I had to join Superface.

Think about how most of the new products and services are built. To create anything today, we have to make machines talk to each other. A new product is usually a new node of added value that can only function when connected to a couple of other such nodes. This is made possible by integrating a bunch of APIs. If we consider a typical commercial service of today, we typically have to implement some payments, communication capabilities, user administration, etc. Many ideas never see the light only because of the cost and expertise necessary to do all the integrations. If we manage to make machines do the hard work and ultimately discover and integrate digital capabilities autonomously, it's going to be big.

We’re on a difficult journey, but what we do is important. Superface is not an intellectual exercise to prove that our architectural pattern is superior to others. We're in it to free people’s hands and minds to do creative work. We believe that enabling more connections between digital capabilities and having machines to handle the tedious stuff can speed up the evolution of mankind.

I wrote this post mainly for my friends, who would never guess I’d go build something for developers and now see me all fired up about APIs. If you happen to be a developer who sometimes has to deal with integrating APIs, I suggest checking out our GitHub and docs. If you’re not technical but are wondering how your organization can benefit from using Superface, hit me at v@superface.ai to talk more.

Using a different geocode service for different countries

Vratislav Kopp — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 12:01:32 +0000

When we want to convert an address into latitude and longitude, we usually have to pick the best provider we can and deal with the varying levels of quality. For instance, sometimes one provider is better than another in a specific area of the world. The first article in this series shows how to access multiple geocoding providers with a single implementation using Superface OneSDK. Let’s now take a look at how can different providers be used based on the country to get the best quality.

Let’s say we do some research and determine that Google Maps work better in the US than other providers (this may not be true). And let’s say that we decide to use Google Maps only for US addresses, but Here.com for everywhere else.

We can write a bit of JavaScript to capture this decision.

const providerName = addressCountry === 'US' ? 'google-apis-maps' : 'here';

Normally, after we sign up for accounts for these services, we’d have to find their API documentation, learn how their API works, install their SDKs or build our own integration code, then manage all the differences between them over time. Instead, we can use our OneSDK to make this simpler.

const provider = await sdk.getProvider(providerName);
const result = await profile.getUseCase('Geocode').perform(
  {
      addressCountry: 'United States',
        addressLocality: 'Manhattan',
        postalCode: 'NY 10036',
        streetAddress: 'Times Square',
  },
  { provider }
);

We’re able to interact with both Google Maps and Here.com with less than 10 lines of code, and we can jump between them based on any criteria we choose. In this case, we chose based on the country, but maybe for your case it needs to be something different.

Check out our geocode page to see learn more about using Superface for geocoding.

Integrate geocoding the right way

Vratislav Kopp — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 11:55:27 +0000

This is the first article in a series covering integrating geocode to Node.js applications in a way that lets you:

Create an integration that never breaks
Use different API providers based on location
Make sure you always get the data you need

There is no single best provider

When integrating geocoding, most developers start by comparing a couple of geocoding API providers, choose the seemingly best one and bake it in their app.

However, there is no single best Geocoding API. Moreover, getting familiar with every considered provider takes time, and hard-wiring just one achieves nothing but vendor lock.

Integrate them all

Instead of looking for a unicorn, integrate the business use-case and access any provider of preference at the runtime. This can be achieved using Superface's open source OneSDK, which serves as a universal interface to many APIs. Here’s how to do it.

Integrate geocoding using Superface OneSDK

The following steps are pretty straightforward, however if this is your first run with Superface or you just want a better understanding of what’s happening under the hood, read the documentation.

Install Superface OneSDK package in your project folder.
```
npm install @superfaceai/one-sdk
```

Install address/geocoding profile.

npx @superfaceai/cli install address/geocoding

Configure desired providers. Nominatim offers their API publicly. No keys required.

# Here.com
npx @superfaceai/cli configure here -p address/geocoding

# Google Maps
npx @superfaceai/cli configure google-apis-maps -p address/geocoding

# Azure Maps
npx @superfaceai/cli configure azure -p address/geocoding

# OpenCage
npx @superfaceai/cli configure opencage -p address/geocoding

# TomTom
npx @superfaceai/cli configure opencage -p address/geocoding

# Nominatim
npx @superfaceai/cli configure nominatim -p address/geocoding

If you need another provider, let me know.

Obtain API keys for the desired providers and set them as an environment variable.

# Here.com
export HERE_API_KEY=your-value-from-here

# Google Maps
export GOOGLE_APIS_MAPS_API_KEY=your-value-from-google-maps

# Azure Maps
export AZURE_API_KEY=your-value-from-azure

# OpenCage
export OPENCAGE_API_KEY=your-value-from-opencage

# TomTom
export TOMTOM_API_KEY=your-value-from-tomtom

How to get API keys: Here.com | Google Maps | Azure Maps | OpenCage | TomTom

Use the following code in your Node.js application and replace the example address with your input:

const { SuperfaceClient } = require('@superfaceai/one-sdk');

async function Geocoding() {
  const sdk = new SuperfaceClient();

  // Load the installed profile
  const profile = await sdk.getProfile('address/geocoding');

  // Choose the provider
  const provider = await sdk.getProvider('nominatim');

  // Use the profile
  const result = await profile
    .getUseCase('Geocode')
    .perform({
      addressCountry: 'United States',
      addressLocality: 'Manhattan',
      postalCode: 'NY 10036',
      streetAddress: 'Times Square',
    },
    { provider }
  );

  // Check out the result
  try {
    const data = result.unwrap();
    console.log(data);
  } catch (error) {
    console.error(error);
  }
}

Geocoding();

Run the code.

Calling the Geocoding function should return a similar result:

{ latitude: '40.757280550000004', longitude: '-73.98585503545917' }

And that’s it. Your basic integration is ready.