Allen Pike, Co-Founder, Steamclock Software
With the modern explosion of apps and platforms, building APIs has become a core skill for any technology business. Building great web based REST APIs will make scaling your business easier, allow third parties to accelerate your growth, and make supporting new platforms and devices much easier. We'll see why and how building great APIs is key to building great software.
Attendees will learn:
- The state of APIs in 2013
- What makes for a great API
- How to make developers love you
- How to feed and care for your APIs
15. Enter REST
• REpresentational State Transfer
• The modern best practice
• Uniform methods, no surprises
• Contrasts with SOAP RPC
vinaysahni.com/best-practices-for-a-pragmatic-
restful-api
25. Future proof your
API
• Always version
• Sometimes you release a bad
API
• New versions mark breaking
changes
• Deprecate and document
26. Support your API
• Documentation is just the seed
• Blog for news
• Forums and Stack Overflow for
help
• Intercom.io for actual support
27. Drive adoption
• Promote novel API uses
• Fund hackathons and
sponsorships
• SEO
• Double down on examples and
docs
• Royal decree
28.
29. Recap• APIs are crucial
• Follow standard REST design
• Return JSON, gzipped, over
https
• Support with great
documentation
• Scale with versioning and
marketing
- I run Steamclock Software- At Steamclock, we build iOS, Android, and JavaScript apps - Our work has been featured by Apple, CNN, and Fast Company- Before founding Steamclock, I was a Software Engineer at Apple
Triopoly No explosion of viable platformsNo one platform dominatesJavaScript apps increasingly consume APIs
Sep 2012: Twitter restricts their APIMar 2013: Netflix restricts their APIJul 2013: Google cans ReaderWhat is going on?
Apple iCloud APIsDropbox APIParse (now owned by FB)Other APIs as a Service
It was like an archeological dig The CTO had no idea this was happening
Not a silver bullet, but at least bronze
Some Enterprises will demand XML or other noise, but provide JSON by default
it's cheap, it's secure, it's easy to support now saves time and bandwidth. Stack Overflow doesn't even accept GZIP off, this is becoming more common
Story This is an alpha-stage platform built by a team of 3. The docs were so thoughtful that Justin trusted them immediately Docs are a marketing message
Swagger is a tool and specification for generating API docs
This is on the homepage of stripe.com. Hell yes. Show both a simple and a complex example
Documentation needs to be googled Reasonable SEO No PDFs, no login walls
Twilio is the top 3 results The #1 result is their REST API docs!
Versions telegraph and enable change Sets the expectation that things may change