An API is a method of communication. At best it’s a tool to make building software easy, but at worse a time-waster and constant hassle. Good APIs abstract complexity and quickly provide clear valuable data, whereas bad APIs abstract too much, don’t allow for any customization, or aren’t clear and therefore are difficult to use. Read more
Developer experience is a vital component of API design. The best developer experience will result in a better, stronger, more useful API, and by extension, a better, stronger, more useful end user experience.
While developer experience is very much a subjective thing that is highly dependent on the developer consumer, there are nonetheless some recurring positive elements that successful APIs with good experience share. Read more
If there’s anything that has the most “bang for the buck” in the IT world, it’s optimization. Optimization, or the process of simplifying, offloading, or otherwise reducing the processing demand of an entity, can have significant benefits to almost any system, and when done properly, can take even the most monolithic system into the realm of high efficiency and extreme usability. Read more
It’s easy to become enveloped in “paradigm-shifting” technical dogma, to the point that API providers overlook personal qualities of the developers that consumer APIs and the end consumers affected by their implementations.
Thankfully, there is an “out”, so to speak, for this kind of behavior. Read more
Error codes are almost the last thing that you want to see in an API response. Generally speaking, it means one of two things — something was so wrong in your request or your handling that the API simply couldn’t parse the passed data, or the API itself has so many problems that even the most well-formed request is going to fail. Read more
