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It took the whole day, but I finally got a simple Node app to work that requires you to log in with your Twitter account. So now, a rant:
Maybe I'm just a shitty programmer, but this stuff is *unbelievably complicated*. Let's start with Twitter's API documentation, which
is about as well-maintained as your department's internal wiki — all broken links, unfinished guides, bad information architecture etc.
It's painfully clear that they don't give a damn about API users. But then, once you've got your head around Oauth, you get to the really
fun part — actually implementing it. If you're lucky, you'll stumble upon passportjs.org, which makes life way easier,
once you figure out that the documentation switches between Express 3 and 4. So once you've installed all the bits of middleware that are
necessary (for whatever reasons), which live separately to Express itself out of deference to the modularity fetish, maybe you'll end up
with a working app. Or maybe not! Maybe you'll get an inscrutable error message that Google can't help with (I did). And capturing Oauth
tokens and storing them against user IDs, and figuring out how to retrieve those credentials for a given request and actually make an API
call with them, is an exercise left to the reader. Honestly, I'm only really scratching the surface of the frustrations I ran into today.
Now I want to be clear: I'm not criticising the people involved in all this stuff, who are no doubt smart and well-intentioned and who
probably made the correct decisions given the information and constraints they were working with. But my god, we MUST be able to do better.
There is something deeply, fundamentally broken with modern software. It's chaos. I'm amazed anything works at all.
