I'm curious about your thoughts on omitting properties vs. setting them to `null` for a public facing API. I'm especially curious about your feelings on mixing and matching these strategies. Should you always stick to one strategy or is it ok to sometimes omit and sometimes use null to express the same idea that "the data is missing"?

An example of a null property:

    {
        "firstName": "John",
        "middleInitial": null,
        "lastName": "Doe"
    }

Compared to the omission of the property:

    {
        "firstName": "John",
        "lastName": "Doe"
    }

Essentially the idea discussed in this Stack Exchange post (ignoring the use of empty strings as an option): https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3437...