I absolutely loathed a lot of Microsoft products for this simple thing. VSTS/VSO/Dev Ops/whateverNameTheyHaveNow, Sharepoint, etc were absolutely atrocious at t

I absolutely loathed a lot of Microsoft products for this simple thing. VSTS/VSO/Dev Ops/whateverNameTheyHaveNow, Sharepoint, etc were absolutely atrocious at this. Here is a deep link that’s 700 character long, with a couple of dozen base64 query strings and nonsensical path. “What’s the problem? Can you use a url shortening service? URLs are long nothing we can do about that” fuck me. Back in 2014, my team had an internal tool to view the state of resources in our system. All resources and their states were stored in a SQL database. Yet, the web app they developed was a SPA (before the invention of routers and stuff) and it never updated its url or supported deep linking. Whenever you wanted to send someone an email or an IM about an issue with a specific resource, you had to tell them “go to X tool, search for Y, click on Z -> W -> M -> O -> K, then you’ll see the issue there”. I found that so fucking infuriating. Why can’t I just use an https://X.com/Y/Z/W/M/O/K https://X.com/Y/Z/W/M/O/K link to share that deeply nested state? When I brought it up multiple times i was always told “it’s not a priority and it’s not that big of a deal” One time we were given 2 weeks to work on whatever we thought needed fixing. I decided to build an alternative that supported deep linking. But I also decided that all deep links should accept an `/api/` prefix that just returned the content in JSON format. It was just a hit with everyone in the team/company that the usage of X tool almost diminished over night even though my tool was much more rudimentary and didn’t have all the features that tool had. Nonetheless, turns out most people just wanted an easy way to share links rather than a “really powerful SPA that lets you dig down and investigate things”. A month later the team that worked on that tool X announced that they now support deep links in a huge email to the whole company. Yet they thought the simple feature of returning JSON data on `/api/` prefix is irrelevant. 5 years after, my tool’s UI became obsolete but the actual service was promoted to a “vital internal service” because so many other teams built automation around the `/api/` prefix URLs and that team had to take that code and maintain it.