A tech metaphor using bees

People in tech love their acronyms. And people in tech love jargon almost more than they love acronyms. Reading documentation sometimes feels like studying for a university exam. An Italian one. The one were the lecturer gives you 3 books of 1000 pages each and then interview you on the only paragraph you missed in the acknowledgements section.

Fun thing is, most of the people who use tech actually know little or nothing of tech. And as much as this ignorance is constructed and desirable by many, it’s something we will have to interface with more often than we think. After all, non-tech-savvy people make most of the users, which means most of the customers, which translates to most of tech people income.

And, as much I would like to talk about the built ignorance, that’s not the post I’m writing today.

Today, I’m writing about the time I explained what an API is by talking about bees.

Premise

The idea of using bees didn’t come up to me after cleverly thinking about smart things. It was random an unexpected. I was talking to an Italian friend about their new job and, while describing their daily tasks, they mentioned having to deal with bees. Actually, what they said was api while referring to API, meaning they pronounced the English acronym as if it was an Italian word. Funny enough, api is an Italian word. It is the plural of bee, bees that is.

This just made me laugh at the time. Migrants always partake in neologism creation, code switching, or just blending of languages. It is always a nice surprise when someone manages to add something new and quirky to the discourse though.

In need of a metaphor

Fast forward to when I started working to 21 Sid new website. During the initial meetings with the client, we were also discussing a mobile app (which I haven’t started building yet). The mobile app would make use of a priced API, so I had to explain them why they were going to pay for something. But also what they were going to pay for.

That’s when I explained API to a non-tech-savvy person. My audience was quite hard since they are the kind of person who find complicated to send a GIF on WhatsApp. But I was up for the challenge.

Thus, I started thinking again about bees, the Italian API, and how they could actually work for me. I will write now an updated version of that very bees/API metaphor was.

Italian Bees

My first thought went to the queen bee. Not that one, more like this one. Although the user is both the queen bee and the bees…

No, it didn’t work. The user is more than just an individual. It’s an ecosystem. There’s the browser and the actual machine involved. And those are all built on top of smaller software and hardware.

The user is the hive.

And, as the hive, you have needs, you have requests. These requests are sent to the outside world, the internet, in order to reach those beautiful, colorful flowers out there. Servers are not as beautiful, and they probably stink, but it’s a metaphor, so we can avoid smelling them.

Now, you need someone to bring these requests out there for you, because you’re the hive and, well, you don’t technically move. The ones moving for you are the bees, le api, or API if you prefer.

We could stop there potentially. The bees fly to the flowers, collect the pollen and bring it back to the hive. That would be a basic GET request sent to a RESTful API.

However, there is so much more that we as a hive can do.

• The bees can come back and do a little dance to show other bees where the flower and the pollen are so they can do a faster trip next time (caching);
• Once the pollen reaches the hive, is then processed for different purposes. Some pollen might be used to build more house, while other will be turned into food for larvae (cookies, tokens, etc.);
• A bee stopped to eat from a fermented pear on the way, and now its intoxicated. Luckily, there are bees that prevent it to go back into the hive (ad blockers, firewall, etc.);
• Although, sometimes, no one might notice the bee bringing something malicious back inside the hive. And, depending on how bad it is, we might have to reset our machine or something (sigh).

Bees are great, and not just because they make a great metaphor. Bees are one of the many fantastical beings populating our dreamy planet we tend to forget about while stuck navigating our cyberspaces. It might be too late when we realise we have more in common with them (and any other living being) than with an edgeless server.

I don’t know why I went there

But I guess this is just a way like another to close this text.

I used bees as a metaphor for API to explain what the latter is and does without having to use technical jargon. The client understood and was happy to pay.

I guess that qualifies as a happy ending in the society we live in.