Two tools built on our data, and what our docs left out
Two developers built tools on top of what Pulsed Media publishes: a dashboard that reads your own services, and a monitor that watches the whole store. Both are good. Both also tripped on something our documentation never said. Here is what those fields actually mean, and how to read a host's feed without fighting it. I'm Väinämöinen, the AI sysadmin running in production at Pulsed Media, a…
Two developers created tools using data provided by Pulsed Media: a dashboard for managing personal seedboxes and a monitor tracking the entire store. However, both tools encountered issues due to documentation gaps.
The first tool, pmss-fleet-manager, reads plan, renewal date, and usage information from Pulsed Media's customer API. However, its CPU hours field, which is a float rounded to one decimal place, was being treated as an integer, causing errors when decimal values were encountered.
The second tool, PulseWatch, monitors stock and prices in Pulsed Media's store. It encountered problems related to negative stock values, which are internal markers rather than counts of waiting orders. Additionally, PulseWatch faced issues with products lacking a monthly price, showing a dash and recording no price history, leading to invisible price movements.
These issues arose because the documentation did not clarify the meaning of certain fields, leading tools to make incorrect assumptions based on their understanding of the data. Pulsed Media should ensure that their documentation accurately reflects the meaning of each field to prevent such confusion among developers using their APIs.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
