Developers Rediscover an Old Protocol During Pandemic
Description
This image uses the 'Distracted Boyfriend' meme format to make a multi-layered pun. The man, labeled 'DEVS DURING CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC', is looking away from his current partner, labeled 'REST & GRAPHQL', to admire a passing woman in red, labeled 'SOAP'. A small watermark for 't.me/dev_meme' is in the bottom-left corner. The humor operates on two levels. First, it's a technical joke for experienced developers. SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is an older, often considered clunky and verbose, web service protocol that has largely been superseded by the more modern REST and GraphQL. The meme humorously suggests that developers are suddenly interested in this legacy technology again. The second layer is the real-world context of the coronavirus pandemic. At the time this meme was created (March 2020), public health advice heavily emphasized hand washing with soap, making the word 'SOAP' ubiquitous. The joke cleverly connects the real-world importance of soap with the technical term, creating a timely and witty piece of commentary
Comments
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The pandemic reminded us of the importance of SOAP. Not the protocol that wraps every function call in 10 layers of XML, but the one that actually helps you get rid of bugs
One WHO briefing about “use more soap” and suddenly the senior architects are rummaging through SVN for those 2005 WSDLs - turns out a pandemic can enforce standards no RFC ever could
The pandemic finally gave us a valid business reason to abandon that 15-year-old SOAP service nobody wanted to touch - "we need to modernize for remote development efficiency" sounds better than "the guy who understood the WSDL retired in 2019."
Ah yes, the pandemic era when we all had time to finally read those SOAP specifications we'd been avoiding for a decade. Nothing says 'I have too much time on my hands' quite like voluntarily parsing WSDL files while REST and GraphQL are right there, offering you type safety and developer ergonomics. But sure, let's debate whether we need WS-Security or WS-ReliableMessaging for our microservices - because clearly what 2020 needed was more complexity and angle brackets
SOAP's verbose XML couldn't compete with REST's HTTP simplicity during lockdown - GraphQL just queried the final nail in the WSDL coffin
For one quarter in 2020, our API roadmap finally mandated SOAP - turns out leadership meant 20‑second idempotent hand‑wash cycles, not WSDLs in prod
2020 was the only time REST and GraphQL lost to SOAP - the protocol with a clean handshake and idempotent retries: wash, rinse, repeat