HOW (NOT) TO BUILD AN API

Finding a well written API is a rare pleasure; we often stumble upon horrors that make us pull our hair out, mostly due to a basic lack of common sense.
To help make common sense actually common, in this talk we would like to go over the most frequent mistakes and how to avoid them.

The session is mostly technology-agnostic, and is suitable to anyone with a programming background.

Some of the issues we’ll cover are:

Consistency: the refuge of the weakly minded.
One DTO to rule them all: is designing requests and responses so hard?
Dates: in how many different ways can you say “next tuesday at noon”?
The often forgotten link between request parameters and response data.
The Promise of a Future that has been broken.
Correlating entities across different API methods.
Authentication, Authorization and Accounting, reinvented. Again.
Dumping your C memory structs and calling it an API – why not.
The bicycle that became a motorcycle upon deletion.
The lost art of paging lists of entities correctly. Or at all.
Ever felt the pain of trying to integrate with an API which was clearly not meant to be used by humans? We did!
Come hear some war stories and what could have been done to avoid some of the pain.

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