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Field Note: When I almost over-engineered a header generator

Authors
  • avatar
    Name
    Eyji Koike Cuff
    Twitter

🛠️ The context

Recently, I had to mimic a Next.js API call in one of our systems. Seems simple enough — until I realized I had to include the mandatory next-router-state-tree header in the request.

We already had some headers in the codebase as constants, but they were looking misplaced. So I thought:

What if I decode the state tree, reuse the base structure, add whatever I need, then re-encode it before sending the request?

It sounded elegant. Reusable. A clean abstraction, maybe even a little RouterHeaderBuilder class.

But as I got closer to implementing it, I paused.

🧠 Abstractions vs. Usefulness

The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became: this header was tightly coupled to the page structure. If the header changed, it meant the site structure likely did too — and the request route would need updating regardless.

So why build a complex system for something so fragile?

Instead of introducing:

  • Decoding logic
  • Encoding utilities
  • Error-prone assumptions about what parts were "reusable"

… I went with something simpler.

✅ The Simpler Solution

I copied the current header (yes, copy/paste), and avoided trying to dynamically rebuild or decode it.

Then I did two things to make it cleaner and safer:

  • Created an enum for known routes and components (no stringly - typed keys)
  • Created a map that holds pre-defined state trees with the enum as keys

So now, if an engineer needs to mimic a different page:

  1. Add a new enum value
  2. Add the new route state to the map
  3. Pass it into the API call directly

Let me show you with a few lines:


class MyStateTree(str, Enum): # str here let's you do string things without calling for the .value property
    ROUTE_ONE = "ROUTE_ONE"

NEXT_STATE_TREE = {
    MyState.ROUTE_ONE: "%MY%20%ENCODED%20ROUTE"
}

# To use it as
session.get(
    url="https://www.myendpoint.com"
    headers={
        "Next-Route-State-Tree": NEXT_STATE_TREE[MyStateTree.ROUTE_ONE]
    }
)

📝 Final Thought

I almost built a clever solution for the wrong problem. What I really needed was something fast, understandable, and easy to change.

Sometimes the best abstraction is no abstraction, just a well-named constant and a clear enum.

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