Ruben’s Blog| ruben.verborgh.org
Who decides what your Solid pod looks like? For a long time, the answer has been the first one who writes, decides. That is, the first app to sculpt documents and containers in your pod determines where other apps need to look for data. Unfortunately, this creates an undesired dependency between apps, which now have to agree amongst each other on how to store things. Yet Solid promises apps that will seamlessly and independently reuse data in order to provide us with better and safer experien...| ruben.verborgh.org
Web services emerged in the late 1990s as a way to access specific pieces of remote functionality, building on the standards-driven stability brought by the universal protocol that HTTP was readily becoming. Interestingly, the Web itself has drastically changed since. During an era of unprecedented centralization, almost all of our data relocated to remote systems, which appointed Web APIs as the exclusive gateways to our digital assets. While the legal and socio-economic limitations of such ...| ruben.verborgh.org
We’re living in a data-driven economy, and that won’t change anytime soon. Companies, start-ups, organizations, and governments all require some of our data to provide us with the services we want and need. Unfortunately, decades of Big Data thinking has led many companies to a consequential fallacy: the belief that they need to harvest and maintain that personal data themselves in order to deliver their services and thus survive in the data-driven economy. This prompted a never-ending ra...| ruben.verborgh.org