If you’re building cars, a specification tells you how a car works. It includes the most important details and perhaps a list of requirements that the end product should fulfill. Once the car gets…

Facebook, Google, GitHub, Netflix, and a few other tech giants have given developers and products a chance to consume their data through APIs and became a platform for them. Even if you are not…

API Evolution is making a comeback these days, and REST advocates have been begging folks to use it for years. Let's learn how.

With API descriptions rising in popularity, the main question I hear folks asking about is "API Design-first" or "code-first". This is a bit of a misleading question because these are not two unique things, there are a few variants.

This is a general design guide for networked APIs. It has been used inside Google since 2014 and is the guide that Google follows when designing Cloud APIs and other Google APIs. This design guide is shared here to inform outside developers and to make it easier for us all to work together.

What to include and how to keep your APIs consistent

APIs allow organizations to give their partners access to data and capabilities, at scale. Extensible and adaptable API ecosystems make it easier for developers to innovate. Building such an ecosystem is a progressive journey with many technical challenges.

Eight of the world’s fun, random, and useless APIs that we think you’ll love tinkering with. From generating placeholder text to sourcing information about your favorite fantasy worlds, these APIs are some of the most light-hearted demonstrations of the power of APIs.

FOAAS (Fuck Off As A Service) provides a modern, RESTful, scalable solution to the common problem of telling people to fuck off.

Here is a copy of the presentation that I gave at API World 2017. I've had the fortune (or misfortune, as the case may be) to work on API platform governance...

Many find they have not one, not two, but dozens of APIs within their organization. RESTful APIs are descriptive, not prescriptive. That is, there is so much...

Breaking and Mending Compatibility

AIP stands for API Improvement Proposal, which is a design document providing high-level, concise documentation for API development. The goal is for these documents to serve as the source of truth for API-related documentation at Google and the way API teams discuss and come to consensus on API guidance.

A Developer Experience Platform for APIs. Services include: Developer Portal Generation, SDK Generation, Documentation Generation, Code Sample Generation, API Specification Conversion, CI/CD Integrations, Package Publishing

Dealing with the Happy Path™ in an API is pretty easy: When a client asks for a resource, show them the resource. When they trigger a procedure, let them know if it was triggered OK, and maybe if it…

A critical review of the popular API paradigms.

To recap, designing microservice APIs is as important as designing other APIs, especially if you want to gain the benefits of the microservice architecture. The important considerations are:

Don’t underestimate the role of API design
Design non-chatty interfaces for improved performance
Achieve loose coupling by building a versioned, evolvable design
Model your domain and design your API after that model, not a specific implementation

Microservices and APIs are not the same and, while we’re at it, neither are microservices and containers. However, the two concepts work together in two different ways: First, microservices can be a means to deploy the backend for an internal, partner, or public API. Second, microservices typically rely on APIs as a language-independent means to communicate with each other in an internal network. Development teams can use similar design approaches and tools for creating both outward-facing and microservice APIs.

This post shows some code examples of how to store the state in the network and the fundamentals of an evolvable API. It also talks about how to decouple client and server.

JonLuca’s Blog - A blog about tech, programming, and information

A collective list of free APIs for use in software and web development.

The JSON Schema Registry
Collaborative data modeling that works in the real world.

Let’s say you’re building your first API. Be it public, private, or some hybrid thereof, don’t be surprised if your first defect is date/time-related. Do not underestimate how much trouble you can get into when it comes to handling date and times.

We feature Arnaud Laruet on building purposeful, usable, and properly constrained APIs: 3 qualities he explores in his book The Design of Everyday APIs.

My work on pragmatic software governance has evolved. It started with a focus scaling good API design across a modern enterprise company. Increasingly, I'm i...

Great APIs are made by skilled humans working together using a great business-oriented method - APIOps Cycles

API versioning is a really difficult topic, and sometimes seen as a merely religious debate. It’s done differently at different companies, and different teams within different companies often vary…

That is one of the reasons why we like to represent most complex ideas of software through pictures and diagrams. Class and sequence diagrams are most commonly understood but there are a large number…

To help guide my workflow, I’ve crafted this API lifecycle definition to help direct my efforts in an ongoing lifecycle approach.

Learn RESTful API design from this guide to the best API design resources on the web.

At QCon New York 2018, Michael Bryzek discussed how to design microservice architectures “the right way”. Key takeaways included: engineers should design schema first for all APIs and events, as this allows the automated code generation of boilerplate code; and investment should be made in automation, such as deployment and dependency management.

Everyone And Their Dog Wants An API, So You Should Probably Learn How To Build Them.

Asbjorn describes a new approach to API versioning, outlining five aspects of smart API change management. Learn to adopt an API change strategy that avoids breaking change yet maintaining efficient development techniques.

Formats, linking, and versioning are important in well-formed RESTful APIs.

RESTful service to deliver JSON response, useful for testing

JSON API, defined at JSONAPI.org, is a practical spec for building web APIs. Its caching features can streamline API requests and increase data consistency.

In modern software development, reaching platform-wide consistency relies on having a single source of truth. Learn how schema-first achieves this.

From programming expertise, team collaboration, to external and internal advocacy, we identity the traits that make up a truly great web API product owner.

We describe pagination, filtering, ranging, and other design techniques that can be used to optimize a web API response.

An API is a user interface for a developer. Learn the best practices to make an API that is easy to adopt and pleasant to use.

I am reminded of a lovely quote that I found through another Medium post by Ken Rogers, of which was originally written by Hemingway: As I write this, I chuckle to myself in seeing a great parallel…

great api versioning strategy

A comprehensive list of documentation generators for web APIs. Compare over 30 API doc solutions side by side. Swagger UI, Apiary, Readme, Aglio, ReDoc ...

Building an API? You'll most definitely want to read this.

api-guidelines - Microsoft REST API Guidelines

Contribute to api-standards development by creating an account on GitHub.

Contribute to api-standards development by creating an account on GitHub.

You can significantly boost the performance of your RESTful services by setting a simple HTTP response header. Learn how to do it.

API management is a term that has been used in the API economy for several years and has existed without acquiring an exact, universal definition. While most protagonists in the API community agree on the core themes of **API management** and why the subject is important, the specifics are frequently defined by the capabilities of commercial “API management” solutions. The term has become so synonymous with these solutions that more than one have it engraved in their brand.

Hystrix is a latency and fault tolerance library designed to isolate points of access to remote systems, services and 3rd party libraries, stop cascading failure and enable resilience in complex distributed systems where failure is inevitable.