Best API Design Quotes

"That's one very important thing. When you are designing any API, think about who's using it, what is it being used for, right?"

"An API should be as small as possible but no smaller."

"Whenever there's an error, you should tell the user of your API as soon as possible after the error has happened."

"You should provide programmatic access to all data that is also available in string form."

"REST provides us with guidelines on how these APIs should be constructed."

"GraphQL makes creating endpoints really simple... you just create a single query field which you're going to query for that actual object."

"With just one query to the server, you're going to be getting back a list of all of the authors and their names and a list of all of their books and their names and no extra information."

"Flexibility is what makes REST APIs really, really good."

"React Canaries allow us to develop these features individually and release the stable APIs incrementally."

"Parameter names are part of the API - make them self-documenting."

"Don't build REST if it doesn't fit your use case."

"API design is absolutely table stakes irrespective of the style."

"API design starts by getting the interfaces right."

"Your complete games REST API would look like this and should offer all the support that your clients expect from a modern backend."

"You should be not restrictive with your APIs, you should give yourself as much freedom to implement as possible to allow for changes that improve performance..."

"What we really should do and strive to do as API designers or API builders is understand all of the trade-offs."

"If you're an API designer, REST means that you don't have to know every single use case every single thing that a client might want to do in the future."

"Everybody seems to love best practices and rules around designing a rest API, but is all this guidance actually good advice?"

"Write the contract write your API to the best of your abilities."

"If you're creating APIs that will be used by other people, my recommendation is don't use an RPC model, use an entity-oriented model and in particular use HTTP JSON as directly and as simply as possible."

"So that means that in this case, if we cannot find the game, we just go ahead and create it. Right, that way the put endpoint is kind of idempotent, so it always returns the same thing, right, so it doesn't matter if it exists or not, we always end up with the resource created."

"One of the most compelling reasons to create a GraphQL API in the first place is that it allows us to expose one data graph potentially with multiple data sources behind it."

"We want to create a route that gets one by id."

"So why would you want to build a REST API in 2021? Well, REST APIs are still the staple of the web development industry."

"GraphQL is an API, it's kind of like a way of designing APIs."

"That's the big difference between GraphQL and a REST API, I can get only the data that I want."

"An API is not for people to use it. It's for machines."

"What makes a good API in this async world?"

"Every API endpoint at that point fits on your screen, the whole class, just the method."

"We design our APIs from the initial concept through to delivery to be cross-platform."

"That's exactly the API that we're kind of looking for."

"Let's start defining the queries and the mutations."

"Upstream APIs tend to be designed for common peripherals, but when it comes to domain-specific peripherals, it's difficult to upstream."

"The user's perception is best understood when you talk to them, to understand the granularity of how your API offering is going to look like."

"The DOM gives us different ways of essentially doing the same thing, which is really a good sign of a well thought out API."

"But sometimes in an API, you want that when a resource is created, you give them the URL where the actual resource is created."

"We want to have the minimal code that is needed for API, rather than adding controllers."

"Be cognizant of what you're returning. It's very pivotal that you understand what you are returning from an API."

"Rails doesn't want you to have to do that yourself; we want to provide you with sensible, self-documenting, simple APIs that just work."

"Rails aims to create beautiful, simple, and self-documenting APIs."

"The insecure option in the API is explicit, so you can immediately see if it's not such a good idea to send sensitive data over it."

"Create a data API, a data access layer."

"Good APIs have three main qualities: They're well documented, very predictable, and testable."

"We are creating our OpenAPI yaml file; we're going to define all of our endpoints here before we even touch the code."

"REST stands for Representational State Transfer. It is an architecture that became very popular in building web APIs."

"By reducing the size of your API, you make it easier to learn, you decrease your file size which is especially important in JavaScript."

"If a user sends in a null or an undefined by accident, you can handle that gracefully."

"API design is user experience for developers."

"When it comes to creating REST APIs, what you're going to want to start to think about is this unified design to how you serialize and index your data."

"Now when it comes to creating REST APIs, you're going to want to start to think about this unified design to how you serialize and index your data."

"No API should ever require you to use a specific data type of its own."

"Consistency in our API is how we make our libraries more accessible to other people."

"Espresso has a really nice, beautiful, concise, and fluent API which makes for frictionless testing."

"This is a way of designing APIs or a process of managing APIs; it is not the Holy Grail, it is not the only solution."

"When you're designing an API, what do they always say? Design the API to be synchronous, and if your caller wants it to be asynchronous, they can very easily do it."

"So let's talk about some of the aspects of great APIs."

"We get to save historically all these different comments and how we review this and changes that we need to make to this API directly."

"This is a nice way of not only making your designs quicker but standardizing your different objects and components within these API designs across the entire organization."

"API first design is important because APIs are business drivers."

"API first design... allows for your business to become this reusable, composable enterprise."

"We want our API to be consistent and it just means that there's less work for us to do on the UI."

"Choose the shortest API and the most intuitive API you can."

"APIs are hard, right? So you really want your APIs to look good, to feel good, to work well."

"Colin helped us to do something by making a pretty API and kind of get the performance win at the same time."

"Design first is when people get together and they talk about the API design before anyone starts writing code."

"Build APIs you won't hate... it sort of gives you example about how not to do things and I think that's a very intuitive approach."

"Swagger is a wonderful specification for describing RESTful APIs."

"A great API has these pieces fit together nicely; they'll be like using Legos, easy to snap together a lot of little bits to build a great system."

"A good API needs to appeal to the most powerful emotion: laziness."

"A great API should be opinionated... you do it the way that the API opinionatedly encourages you to."

"When you're building an API, you have to take sides and pick who's right, pick a direction and run with it."

"Keep those verbs away from the base URL and instead use nouns."

"Make sure the API you expose to the consumer allows them to keep their code testable."

"You're going to write more compact code, much richer data structures, and you can develop a lot cleaner APIs."

"Espresso will kind of have a formula that is what people call a fluent API."

"The code you write should be as simple and as direct in terms of mapping to the API model that the API designer had intended."

"Any part of an API that isn't fully substitutable is a Liskov violation."

"Cogeneration can really improve the simplicity of APIs and their robustness in applications using libraries that use cogeneration."

"Make things in your API as familiar as possible to someone who's already understands the domain that your service exists in."

"Be consistent. If you're consistent across the whole of your API in how you do something, it means that you only need to document it once."