APIs have become one of the cornerstones of digital transformations. As more and more businesses open up their APIs for public consumption, the concept of developer experience becomes crucial for the successful rollout of the APIs. Good developer experience with APIs depends on good principles of API governance, API management, and API design.

In this presentation, I explain how the principles of domain-driven design help us design APIs that are easier to understand and to consume. APIs are not just a HTTP interfaces to databases, they’re interfaces to service capabilities. We’ll see how to use DDD to define the domain of an API and to model its resources. We’ll use strategic design to narrow down the scope of an API, and to avoid mixing properties from different domains. I’ll also show heuristics to translate domain models and operations into the more restricted representational capabilities of REST APIs.

The result of this exercise will be a well-structured API with consistent paths and resources that developers will love to use to and to build integrations with.