How I explained REST to my wife

I'm a woman, and I didn't find this patronizing or sexist, unlike some of the commenters on both the post comments and here. I've gotten much more into web development in the past couple years, and this post reminds me of a handful of precious conversations I've had with incredibly smart people who took the time to bring together concretes and abstractions together in a way I could understand. I think this is a good post to share with other…

I can't stand the "blog post as conversation" format. It's fine if you're quoting a conversation for one or two paragraphs, but for something this long you should do me (the reader) the courtesy of speaking directly to me. Also this is giving way too much credit for the creation of the URL. The format of the URL is not some miracle, genius insight. It is a natural result of network computing, and similar descriptors of how to find a…

The sexism comments bother me. They reveal a level of sensitivity to possible stereotypes that itself indicates the power these stereotypes still have. In a way, the comments are a self fulfilling prophecy. If the wife had been portrayed as being ditsy, that would be worse, though I'm not even sure that's necessarily wrong. In any case, I thought that the woman was portrayed as an inquisitive layperson able to absorb new ideas. Reminds me of this Richard Feynman story…

Wife: How does it work? Ryan: The web? Wife: Yeah. Ryan: Hmm. Well, it’s all pretty amazing really. And the funny thing is that it’s all very undervalued. The protocol I was talking about, HTTP, it’s capable of all sorts of neat stuff that people ignore for some reason. Wife: You mean http like the beginning of what I type into the browser? Ryan: Yeah. That first part tells the browser what protocol to use. That stuff you type in…