James Samuel
▪ ~8 years of experience making
software run
▪ Tech Lead @Tier Mobility
▪ Technical Content Creator
▪ Creator of HubOfML Newsletter
▪ AWS Community Builder
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@samueljabiodun
@abiodunjames
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API is eating the world
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API has continued to gather popularity,
grew by 100% in 2020
Postman: State of the API Report
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▪ Offers APIs to open up services e.g Twitter, Facebook,
Salesforce, etc
▪ API-first companies e.g Stripe, Contentful, Twilio, Algolia
etc
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Certain API products struggle to attract users.
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Hard to consume and integrates with some APIs.
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Some APIs don't live up to expectations.
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Postman Report 2020: Obstacles to consuming APIs
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How do you create APIs developers
love to use?
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Good APIs are:
❏ Easy Learn
❏ Easy to use
❏ Hard not-easy to misuse
❏ Easy to read and maintain clients that use them
❏ Easy to evolve
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Good API products make life easy
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How do you make life easy?
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Understand the
“Why” and “How”
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▪ Why do you want to build an API product?
▪ What problem will it solve?
▪ How will it help me achieve my goals?
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Example Goal: Drive usage and monetize internal
services
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The goal isn't always obvious
…Ask
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Design Matters
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“how quickly developers can get up to
speed and start enjoying success using
your API”
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➔ Vocabularies: Are your words, terms easy to understand for your users?
➔ Styles: What protocols are you supporting, Rest or GraphQL?
➔ Naturalness & Consistency:
◆ Do your users have to change their usual ways of solving their problems
significantly?
◆ Did you follow established standards and conventions?
◆ What level of familiarity will you provide? Are you APIs similar to what your
users may have used in the past?
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“Great API products are designed with
rigorous customer focus, a deep
understanding of the customers, their
needs and desires”
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How to approach API Design
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Identify your users & the activities they want to get done.
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Break down the activities they want to get down.
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Create APIs prototypes and validate with a use-case.
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Build clients that use the prototypes.
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Validate & re-iterate.
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API Design is a
continuous process
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You won't get the first version of your APIs
right. Some lessons can't be learned
through customer interviews only.
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Affordance is that property of an object
which shows users the actions they can
take.
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Get Good at
Documentation
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What's one of the first things you look at
when exploring or evaluating a third party
APIs?
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●
Evaluation
●
Integration
●
Debugging
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Evaluation
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Integration/Getting Started
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Troubleshooting
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If you’re providing only one type of
documentation, you’re undeserving your
users.
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●
Who are you creating for?
● What are they trying to achieve?
● Why are you creating this?
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Get Development
Right
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Instead of focusing on CRUD, focus on
goals and the sequence of actions
required to achieve them.