Bastard Operator From Hell API

Every IT professional knows the legendary Bastard Operator From Hell stories by Simon Paul Travaglia – a satirical masterpiece about the daily struggles (and excuses) of system administrators. Inspired by these tales, and Jeff Ballard’s curated collection of hundreds of excuses, I created a simple but fun API to generate them on demand.

The BOFH Excuse API provides developers and IT teams with an easy way to lighten up incident reports, error dashboards, or just brighten the mood in the office.

BOFH-API-Usage Overview

1. Get a random excuse
2. Get several random excuses
3. Get a certain excuse via id
4. Get all excuses
5. Links
6. Web-Generator

Get a random excuse

  // GET /v1/excuses/random
https://bofh-api.bombeck.io/v1/excuses/random/

  // returns a single random excuse as json
[
  {
    "id": 152,
    "quote": "My pony-tail hit the on/off switch on the power strip.",
    "source": "http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/",
    "date": "2021-01-12"
  }
]

Get several random excuses

  // GET /v1/excuses /random/{number}
https://bofh-api.bombeck.io/v1/excuses/random/5

  //  returns 5 random excuses as json
[
  {
    "id": 292,
    "quote": "We ran out of dial tone and we're and waiting for the phone company to deliver another bottle.",
    "source": "http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/",
    "date": "2021-01-12"
  },
  {
    "id": 308,
    "quote": "CD-ROM server needs recalibration",
    "source": "http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/",
    "date": "2021-01-12"
  },
  ...
]

Get a certain excuse via id

  // GET /v1/excuses /id/{id}
https://bofh-api.bombeck.io/v1/excuses/id/42

  // returns the explicit excuse
[
  {
    "id": 42,
    "quote": "spaghetti cable cause packet failure",
    "source": "http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/",
    "date": "2021-01-12"
  }
]

Get all excuses

  // GET /v1/excuses/all
https://bofh-api.bombeck.io/v1/excuses/all

  // returns a list with all excuses ordered by id
 [
  {
    "id": 1,
    "quote": "clock speed",
     "source": "http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/",
    "date": "2021-01-12"
  },
  ...
]

Links:

You can find the API here: bofh-api.bombeck.io/v1/excuses

Web-Generator:

You can find a simple online generator here: it-excuse.bombeck.io