Your API is a UI

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Anonymous at 11:22 on 22 Aug 2015

Excellent talk. So many practical tips on building and maintaining APIs, and not just constrained to web APIs.

Fantastic talk with great examples, actionable advice, and pointers that will help guide any developer implementing an API. The hierarchy of needs was particularly useful in helping to illustrate how API systems can (and should) evolve. The note about maintaining functionality (avoiding breaking changes) to protect end-users unorthodox use cases was something that's missing from many similar talks.

Anonymous at 11:24 on 22 Aug 2015

Great talk.

It could be improved by mixing more concrete examples with the existing abstract level information.

Anonymous at 11:25 on 22 Aug 2015

Anonymous at 11:33 on 22 Aug 2015

General overview , was expecting more specific advice

I think examples on the slides would have really helped. I appreciated that you touched on, and spoke of, a library's API and not just REST.

Anonymous at 12:41 on 22 Aug 2015

Some examples surrounding abstraction vs extensibility would have been useful.

Perhaps showing how building low level, single responsibility classes or API endpoint allow for better composibility, but are harder to use for the simple use-case that someone might want. But on the flip side, you can wrap those small components in increasingly more use-case oriented facades to expose an API that expresses intent, and is easy to use.

That would give you the best of both worlds. And by starting out with small, single-purpose Apis/components, you can assemble them together in ways you've observed your users consuming them - that is identity and extract use cases and expose Apis that express those use cases.

Good overview of important principles. It was nice to see the user-based focus on APIs and where the pitfalls were if you did not. The car/driver analogy was particularly apt. apiux.com was a good find too. I hadn't considered specifically documenting what a breaking change was, either. Clearly speaking from a wealth of experience, and comfortable delivery. Image credits were a nice touch too.

Really awesome talk on API design. Very practical advice that was simultaneously conceptually mind blowing. As the talk went on it kinda dawned on me that alot of this thinking was taken from traditional UX practices, which was a big lightbulb moment of the conference for me :)

Very interesting talk. I came away from it with a much different view on how our APIs should work, and have plenty of improvements to implement at work now.