Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 112 posts

Re: “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

#101

Post by ethbr0 »

kingaillas wrote: post #73
bfieidhbrjr wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reminds me of a description of MSFT's first XML-based office file formats (not sure if its true or was a joke) but it went something like wky4b5tlwybkjbb2...

I kind of remember a massive CDATA blob... but my memory must be playing tricks on me: Wikipedia shows some sample markup of the pre-2007 Microsoft Office ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_XML_formats ) and it doesn't look bad at all. And it seems after 2007 they switched to an ECMA standard.

In all fairness, during the first XML migration, I'm sure internal MS folks were just as baffled at the previous format.

Re: “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

#102

Post by mleonhard »

simonbarker87 wrote: post #61

If you have had the misfortune of interacting with Amazon seller central or vendor central as a merchant, as I sadly have. This won’t come as a surprise, it boggles my mind how bad, buggy and user hostile that software is. The fact that Amazon keeps moving forward with their IT estate as bad as it is amazes me.

This is my experience, too. I was a new paying user of Amazon Seller Central, confused by the UI and missing documentation, and they simply ignored my ticket.

Re: “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

#103

Post by jlevers »

brianwawok wrote: post #84
hpoe wrote: post #5

Just an FYI. This is about Amazon's MWS API, which is Merchant Web Services, used to interact with the Amazon part of Amazon not the AWS side of Amazon. Also having working on an OSS Ruby library for it, and having to had work with it quite a bit, I can confirm. The MWS APIs leave a lot to be desired of, but they are an absolute gem compared to the Ebay APIs. My take on the problem is that these APIs were developed i…

EBay added a rest API. They still have the old XML one. They sometimes interact in fun ways!!!

For some reason the data you send to eBay's REST APIs doesn't always show up in their UI...specifically, if you use their RESTful Inventory API, you can't see _any_ of it from the Selling page! Not sure why...e-commerce APIs seem to be (on average) remarkably bad.

Re: “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

#104

Post by jlevers »

I'm currently working with this API, and I think that if I didn't have experience with Amazon's old seller API (MWS), I wouldn't even know where to start with this one. As it is, it's taken me many, many hours to figure out how to make this one (sorta) work.

(Shameless plug: I wrote detailed walkthroughs of how to get access to[0] and build a basic application with[1] the Selling Partner API).

[0] https://jesseevers.com/selling-partner-api-access/ [1] https://jesseevers.com/spapi-first-application/

Re: “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

#106

Post by mook »

djohnston wrote: post #54
sequoia wrote: post #50

Seems that API documentation (in this case) is not terribly important to the bottom line :) (So why should the bother fixing it?)

Some fleeting sense of pride in one's work, I would suppose. But yeah that doesn't move those dashboards.

That only works if the pride would be induced in the one allocating developer time.

Re: “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

#107

Post by PurpleFoxy »

simonbarker87 wrote: post #61

If you have had the misfortune of interacting with Amazon seller central or vendor central as a merchant, as I sadly have. This won’t come as a surprise, it boggles my mind how bad, buggy and user hostile that software is. The fact that Amazon keeps moving forward with their IT estate as bad as it is amazes me.

They get away with it because there is no competition. Well there is eBay, but that has an even worse api.

What are you doing to do? Deal with it or decide to not sell your products?

Re: “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

#108

Post by PurpleFoxy »

geofft wrote: post #63

I hope the software industry realizes that good documentation is more valuable than good code. Code is transient, and even good code today will be called techdebt tomorrow when the next language or framework or library shows up. But bad documentation impedes your ability to write good code, your ability to work with other parts of the organization, and your ability to grow your business by having outsiders integate w…

It’s worth fuck all because sellers will bang their head on a wall for 2 months until they work it out because they have no other option.

Re: “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

#109

Post by me_me_me »

pengaru wrote: post #20
hmaxwell wrote: post #7

I won't touch any of amazon's products with a 10ft pole because of the way they treat their warehouse workers. Making their warehouse employees pee in bottles to make their metrics or risk being fired, that's just on a whole new level of extracting every joule of work out of a human being.

It's been surprising to see how much better people tend to view Amazon vs. Walmart when Amazon is just the next iteration of megacorp retail consolidation in the same vein with an increasingly horrible record of employee exploitation and abuse.

When even one cent difference in cost equals millions in profit, its much easier to pretend you are dealing with numbers and not people.

I am not defending anyone only pointing out that maybe we shouldn't have entities so big that dissociation of mid to high level management decision's to reality is so easy. Where guilt and responsibility is pushed down the ladder on daily basis.

Re: “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

#110

Post by simonbarker87 »

PurpleFoxy wrote: post #107
simonbarker87 wrote: post #61

If you have had the misfortune of interacting with Amazon seller central or vendor central as a merchant, as I sadly have. This won’t come as a surprise, it boggles my mind how bad, buggy and user hostile that software is. The fact that Amazon keeps moving forward with their IT estate as bad as it is amazes me.

They get away with it because there is no competition. Well there is eBay, but that has an even worse api. What are you doing to do? Deal with it or decide to not sell your products?

I ran a small manufacturing business that listed on Amazon in both seller and vendor central. I was just interacting with it as a ”common user” for 5 years. Never tried to develop against the API - we did about £300,000 per year through the platforms.
Post reply on HN