Back in 2006, Google discovered that an extra 500 milliseconds of latency could drop traffic by as much as 20%. That was twelve years ago; now web users expect faster responses than ever before, and as an API practitioner, it’s your duty to make that happen! Read more
In the spring of 2017, Twitter published a series of guidelines for automated API users utilizing bots. These guidelines were created to help control the intent, actions, and result of bots on the service. Accordingly, there was some discussion about just what these guidelines did and didn’t do, and how valuable such a set of guidelines were. 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
What is a consistent attribute across successful API programs? They all have awesome developer portals. Good API documentation is easy to navigate and understand, but the best, shining developer center pushes onboarding and actual implementation to new levels of usability, to the point where integrating the API becomes as simple as cake — well, at least as simple as technically possible. Read more
In September 2006, only a few months into its existence, Twitter came out with the first version of its public API. This was surprisingly early in an age when social APIs were not yet prevalent, especially since Twitter had yet to become the success story that seems so obvious in hindsight. Read more
