Supporting The OpenAPI Specification (fka. Swagger Specification) format when creating Web API tools is a must-have. Not for the sake of the format itself but rather because of the benefits you’ll get from it. But those benefits will come only if OpenAPI is used the right way.

OpenAPI, or the OpenAPI Specification, formerly known as the Swagger Specification, is a machine-readable and human-friendly API description format. That short description is correct but does not help to understand what it is OpenAPI: it’s the Rosetta Stone of the Web API world. Let’s see why.

Jumping into the API-first train, even only focusing on private/internal APIs, will have an impact on budgets. Organizations need to find ways to redistribute budgets in order to enable any team that needs to provide APIs to do it in the best possible conditions. Is monetizing private/internal API the solution? Would crowdfunding private make sense?

An often unintended consequence of an internal API-first strategy is having teams with not much IT jumping, willingly or not, in the API train. That inevitably will raise budget questions which answers will determine the success of the API-first strategy.

Let’s learn to use Twitter v2 API tweets lookup operations to render simple text tweets and their author just like Twitter does. We’ll learn a few things about API design and API documentation in general and Postman based API documentation in particular in the making. I hope this will give you some ideas for the design and documentation of your API.

An internal API-first strategy will inevitably raise budgets questions; you must be aware of that. One of them is who will pay for the brand new API platform and how? The success of an internal API-first strategy may depend on the billing model of the API platform.

LEGO is looking for an associate API Engineer for their API platform. LEGO+APIs! That looks awesome! But what is an API platform and what skills do you need to build it? Does the LEGO job offer list them all? Do you have them all? This post answers those questions and may help you apply to such offers or post the appropriate job offers to build your own API platform.

Postman Visualizer is perfect to tinker with data returned by an API and learn how it works. I found using HandlebarJS HTML templates quite convenient. But I was mindblown when I realized I could take advantage of Bootstrap to generate outstanding visualization without much effort. Let’s see that with The 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons API in its GraphQL version.

“What will be the style of our public/partner APIs? Should we reuse our existing private APIs style? Should we restart from scratch and use a totally different style?” This discussion happens quite often in organizations starting their public API journey (and if it did not happen, it must happen.) This discussion can have important consequences that must be carefully evaluated.

What can we learn from tweets lookup error responses of Twitter v2 API? We can learn how to use the tweets lookup operations parameters without reading much of the documentation. We may also learn a few API design, implementation, and documentation principles in the making. And icing on the cake, the technique shown in this post can be applied on any API.