Upgrade to Pro
— share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …
Speaker Deck
Features
Speaker Deck
PRO
Sign in
Sign up for free
Search
Search
Principles of Awesome APIs and How to Build Them.
Search
Keavy McMinn
November 18, 2019
Programming
126
17k
Principles of Awesome APIs and How to Build Them.
Keavy McMinn
November 18, 2019
Tweet
Share
More Decks by Keavy McMinn
See All by Keavy McMinn
Improving your workflow with the GitHub API
keavy
9
870
The Successful Shipper
keavy
8
470
Integrations
keavy
3
610
How to mend a broken identity
keavy
0
210
Better work, through better feedback.
keavy
1
480
Internal Tools
keavy
9
1.5k
Must. Try. Harder.
keavy
0
490
Career Health Check
keavy
0
290
From Artist To Programmer
keavy
1
410
Other Decks in Programming
See All in Programming
CIBMTR振り返り+敗北から学ぶコンペの取り組み方反省
takanao
1
320
読まないコードリーディング術
hisaju
1
160
AWS CDKにおけるL2 Constructの仕組み / aws-cdk-l2-construct
gotok365
4
640
Datadog DBMでなにができる? JDDUG Meetup#7
nealle
0
160
Drawing Heighway’s Dragon- Recursive Function Rewrite- From Imperative Style in Pascal 64 To Functional Style in Scala 3
philipschwarz
PRO
0
200
バックエンドNode.js × フロントエンドDeno で開発して得られた知見
ayame113
4
910
Accelerate your key learnings of scaling modern Android apps
aldefy
0
100
フロントエンドオブザーバビリティ on Google Cloud
yunosukey
0
110
Kotlinの開発でも AIをいい感じに使いたい / Making the Most of AI in Kotlin Development
kohii00
5
2.3k
「その気にさせる」エンジニアが 最強のリーダーになる理由
gimupop
2
280
15分で学ぶDuckDBの可愛い使い方 DuckDBの最近の更新
notrogue
3
900
Rails 1.0 のコードで学ぶ find_by* と method_missing の仕組み / Learn how find_by_* and method_missing work in Rails 1.0 code
maimux2x
1
280
Featured
See All Featured
Templates, Plugins, & Blocks: Oh My! Creating the theme that thinks of everything
marktimemedia
30
2.3k
Making Projects Easy
brettharned
116
6.1k
Rebuilding a faster, lazier Slack
samanthasiow
80
8.9k
Learning to Love Humans: Emotional Interface Design
aarron
273
40k
Side Projects
sachag
452
42k
Imperfection Machines: The Place of Print at Facebook
scottboms
267
13k
GitHub's CSS Performance
jonrohan
1030
460k
A Philosophy of Restraint
colly
203
16k
JavaScript: Past, Present, and Future - NDC Porto 2020
reverentgeek
47
5.3k
Into the Great Unknown - MozCon
thekraken
35
1.7k
Evolution of real-time – Irina Nazarova, EuRuKo, 2024
irinanazarova
6
590
Designing Experiences People Love
moore
140
23k
Transcript
Principles of Awesome APIs and How to Build Them. Keavy
McMinn, Fastly RubyConf 2019 @keavy
None
None
None
Try to work with the wind, don't fight it all
the time.
Consistent. Stable. Well-documented.
APIs: Our experience as consumers
APIs: Our experience as producers
APIs: Our experience as producers Fixing it would actually break
it.
APIs: Our experience as producers
Application Programming Interface
None
APIs = Constraints
Work with the constraints.
Remember these constraints are good for us too.
None
None
None
Consistent
Consistent Consistent data
✅ { "admin": true } ❌ { "admin": "1" }
API Descriptions — JSON Schema — Open API (formerly Swagger)
— RAML — APIs.json — API Blueprint — Postman Collections — Async API
Consistent Have one source of truth.
Have one source of truth. JSON Schema
JSON Schema committee gem https://github.com/interagent/committee
JSON Schema PRMD gem https://github.com/interagent/prmd
JSON Schema Online examples http://bit.ly/heroku-schema
It will be amaaazing!
Consistent Monitor your inconsistencies.
Monitor your inconsistencies. Compare what you say and what you
do.
Monitor your inconsistencies. Try a portion of your API
Monitor your inconsistencies. Technical deep dive
Monitor your inconsistencies. Technical deep dive https://github.com/whitequark/parser
# Get a dog. get "/dogs/:dog_id" do authorize_access :users, :bots
# finds the dog # renders the dog as JSON end
Then it will be amaaazing!
Stable
Stable Invest in upfront design.
Invest in upfront design. — What will users do with
it? — What does your business need from it? — What does it look like? — What will you call it?
Remember: puppies APIs are for life not just for Christmas!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/27587002@N07/5170590074
Design while the cost of change is low.
Stable A calm space.
metoffice.gov.uk
Stable
Change itself is not necessarily bad. Negative impact from change
is bad.
Minimize the negative impact
Well-documented
Well-documented Inform users about everything, early and often
Well-documented Then remember that people don’t read.
Well-documented Enable a holistic view. — Endpoints that are undocumented
— Endpoints that are in any special phase — Anything to be deprecated — Dates
Well-documented Governance
Well-documented Shared understanding is easier when it’s all written down.
Well-documented Internal guides
Well-documented API Styleguide
API Styleguide Avoid verbs and adjectives ❌ GET /pets/most-recent ✅
GET /pets?sort=date-added
API Styleguide Make exceptions deliberately GET /repos/:owner/:repo/releases/latest
Well-documented Internal guides
Well-documented Who is responsible for what?
Well-documented Who gets a say in decision making?
It doesn’t have to be fucking hard. It just has
to be consistent. Which is fucking hard. — Brett Sutton, Triathlon coach
Good luck! Thank you, @keavy