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A thread 🧵 of _terrible_ design decisions for the internal APIs of the two Italian high speed train operators, Italo and Trenitalia. Hardcoded passwords, terrible translations, spelling mistakes, xml in json (but utf8 encoded and transmitted as an array of numbers), it's all here. Enjoy!

Trenitalia's internal API for getting the real-time travel info for a train has a beautiful translation error: the platform identifier field is called `binary`, because in Italian, platform is "binario".

And the value is "2" 😂

That’s still excusable, there are platforms that are not numbers (2A, or just B etc)

This endpoint has another great design choice: the departure and arrival data is stored in two arrays with fields with a description of either "Scheduled departure", "Actual Departure", "Scheduled Arrival", or "Actual Arrival". Note the capitalization difference between "departure" and "arrival".

On startup, the Italo app also fetches a list of all stations Italo can sell tickets to/from. This file is 2.3 MB, but not because of the list of stations. No, it's because it contains for every station, the list of every other station that is reachable from that station (and much more garbage)