The blog post is an entertaining read, but I was left with the impression the author might have tried do embellish, particularly in it's disbelief angle.

Take this passage:

> The app relied on a SOAP service, not to do any servicey things. No, the service was a pure function. It was the client that did all the side effects. In that client, I discovered a massive class hierarchy. 120 classes each with various methods, inheritance going 10 levels deep. The only problem? ALL THE METHODS WERE EMPTY. I do not exaggerate here. Not mostly empty. Empty.

> That one stumped me for a while. Eventually, I learned this was in service of building a structure he could then use reflection on. That reflection would let him create a pipe-delimited string (whose structure was completely database-driven, but entirely static) that he would send over a socket.

Classes with empty methods? Used reflection to create a pipe-delimited string? The string was sent over the wire?

Why congratulations, you just rediscovered data transfer objects, specifically API models.