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Architecture & Design

API Design Reviews Are Dead. Long Live API Design Reviews!

To design APIs at scale, it takes deliberate effort to create consistency and make several discrete APIs feel like a platform. This requires an efficient and useful API design review process.

Jason Harmon
on May 22, 2023
Architecture & Design

A Standardized, Specification-Driven API Lifecycle

At QCon Plus last November, Kin Lane, Chief Evangelist with Postman, and the Open Technologies Team lead presented on API specifications. API specifications are essential to him and at Postman. So he wanted to share a bit of how they see API specifications impacting how they produce and consume APIs.

Kin Lane
on Mar 15, 2022
Architecture & Design

Using API-First Development and API Mocking to Break Critical Path Dependencies

Teams are using API mocking to break critical path dependencies and enable what were serial execution sequences into parallel paths. This article looks at where mocks should be used for the greatest impact and provides a model to estimate the effect of implementing API mocking and an API-first approach.

Wojciech Bulaty
on Nov 17, 2021
Development

Enterprise API Management: Q&A with Book Author Luis Weir

In the Enterprise API Management book, Luis Weir provides technology-agnostic strategies that organizations can implement to drive more predictable outcomes. The topics that Weir covers in this book include the Business Value of APIs, Business-Led API Strategy, API-Led Architectures, API-Architecture Styles, API Life Cycle and more.

Kent Weare Luis Augusto Weir
on Dec 31, 2019
Architecture & Design

Using OpenAPI to Build Smart APIs for Dumb Machines

This article discusses how to build, manage and maintain APIs with OpenAPI, including some of the most notable features in v. 3.0.

Adam Leventhal
on Jun 21, 2019
.NET

On Abstractions and For-Each Performance in C#

Donald Knuth famously said, “We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time”. But when faced with the other 3%, it is good to know what’s going on behind the scenes. So in this article we’ll be taking a dive into the foreach loop.

Jonathan Allen
on Sep 29, 2016
.NET

Designing with Exceptions in .NET

Exceptions are an integral part of working with .NET, but far too many developers don’t think about them from an API design perspective. Most of their work begins and ends with knowing which exceptions they need to catch and which should be allowed to hit the global logger. You can significantly reduce the time it takes to correct bugs if you design the API to use exceptions correctly.

Jonathan Allen
on Sep 09, 2016
Architecture & Design

Microservices Evolution at SoundCloud

At the MicroXchg conference in Berlin, Bora Tunca from SoundCloud presented the evolution of SoundCloud’s microservices architecture throughout the years. We had the opportunity to interview him and learn more about SoundCloud’s architecture evolution and microservices in general.

Alex Giamas
on Mar 21, 2016
Development

Graph API in a Large Scale Environment

MyHeritage is a rapidly-growing destination used around the world to discover, preserve and share family histories. There is increasing demand for our services, accessed both internally and externally by our partners via the FamilyGraph API. Millions of API calls are made every day providing a huge challenge in terms of performance, scalability and security.

Maor Cohen
on Feb 13, 2016
Metadata-Driven Design: Designing a Flexible Engine for API Data Retrieval

Bulk data is commonly accessed via files & FTP. As the world moves toward APIs to facilitate collaboration, what are the requirements for data APIs? This article describes a meta-data driven architecture for bulk data ingestion. Two APIs operate in parallel to provide data changes as well as the data records themselves. An example demonstrates how API responses are parameterized using meta-data.

Aaron Kendall
on Apr 13, 2015
Review: Designing APIs for the Web

Mike Amundsen's video series "Designing APIs for the Web" is a straightforward dive into API design suitable for a broad set of stakeholders. The thirteen part series provides a rich blend of practical advice, new ideas & a bit of controversy to keep you on your toes. This article reviews the series so you know what to expect. It provides an overview of the content and a balanced commentary.

Mark W. Foster
on Dec 06, 2014
Why Some Web APIs Are Not RESTful and What Can Be Done About It

Many Web API designers claim their are RESTful, but their APIs have little in common with REST. What can be done to make a web service API truly RESTful?

Abel Avram
on Oct 26, 2014