muuntaja VS paos

Just library-driven-development.

I used the paos library (https://github.com/xapix-io/paos). Mainly followed the quick start examples on the github page. Fetched the wsdl from the API provider, pulled out the SOAP envelope which translates into a Clojure map. The API provider has a bunch of soap services that each provide a large number of keys in the envelope but many keys in many services aren't capable of actually doing anything server-side. This was . . . documented poorly.

We have dev and test environments for this specific API provider so I hacked around and made calls until I had everything working.

This is a perfect example of the kind of one-off stuff I often use Clojure for. Quick prototypes to get work done. There are many groups in my larger organization and a common experience for me is to have groups tell you "X can't be done because Y." In this case, a vendor was charging 5 figure fees per data migration effort for each planned migration. The plan was to roll out by group and there are many groups. My immediate question was "can't we do this with the API and save these fees?" The answer was "no, not possible." About three days later I had a working version for this admittedly simple use case, demo'd it, rolled it into production. The cost savings will be in the low six figures. Of course, once it was working the original internal group came back to re-implement the project in another language because "bus factor" but tbh there is lots of weirdness in my larger employer organization about who gets to do what. Once I had shown we could do it relatively easily, teams come out of the woodwork to grab it so that they can add the cost savings to their yearly brag results.

I could write for days about this type of thing . . .