Co-founder of APIs You Won't Hate, and part techie, part woodland creation, and ancient woodland restoration. Co-founder of @ProtectEarthUK. @philsturgeon@mastodon.green
Around this time of year we're thinking about things we're going to do differently, new practices we've been putting off for too long, and mistakes we want to avoid continuing into another year. For many of us in the API world, that is going
A million things can go wrong when an API client talks to an API, from the expected to the unexpected, from business logic and validation failures, to dropped connections and race conditions. The server could run out of RAM, the request could time out, an automatic retry might trigger a
Some API developers use API descriptions to plan the interface of an API before building it, which is known as the "API design first" workflow. Others build the API then generate (or manually produce) API descriptions later, which is the "code-first" workflow. We wrote API Design-first
Updated 2019-05-29: OpenAPI v3.1 has dropped SemVer, so a few things that were going to be deprecated are now just straight up removed. This post has been updated to reflect that. Updated 2021-01-10: JSON Schema released Draft 2020-12 which clarified a few edge cases, it's not a
Ask 100 developers where a semicolon should go, and you'll either get 100 answers, or a all-on-all fist fight. To save this from happening at work, most folks implement a style guide, which beyond helping with consistent style to avoid new developers getting shouted at for "doing
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. Code-First, Write Docs "When We Have
One problem with building applications that talk to external dependencies like APIs, is that the applications are talking to external dependencies. This opens up a whole can of worms when it comes to testing the application. You may well have heard developers saying: don’t let tests hit external dependencies!
Validation can mean a lot of things, but in API land it generally means figuring out if the data being sent to the API is any good or not. Validation can happen in a lot of different places - it can happen on the server, and it can happen in
Nobody out there thinks you should always use REST for every single API being built, nor should you ever use any one paradigm for everything, but a growing number of people misunderstand REST so badly they think they never need it. As with most things, there is a whole bunch
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 completed without a problem. What to do when something doesn’t
Recently a bunch of us API nerds got into a big old chat about what to call what you are writing when you write OpenAPI for your API. Some people call it the API specification, others think that "specification" is a word reserved only for the markdown file
Another guest post from our friend Darrel Miller. This is my attempt to make the HTTPbis caching rules more accessible and hopefully shine a light on how powerful HTTP caching can be. I’ve been working on a Pluralsight course that talks about how to use the Microsoft HttpClient library.