One day I can say “Amazon did that, we should do it too” and may be quite displeased to hear “but, we’re not Amazon”. And the next one, I can be quite displeased to hear “Github did that, we should do it too” and respond “it’s not because Github did it, that we should do it too”. Why such inconsistency?

While doing API design reviews and API design training sessions, I often see resource paths designed in an anarchic way. By anarchic, I mean their various levels seem to have been chosen randomly or some of them seem at awkward places. But why should such paths should be considered wrong? Let’s see a few examples of how to not design resource paths to talk about it.

This post is dedicated to all English as a Second, or Foreign, Language (ESL, EFL) API designers. Et tout spécialement mes compatriotes français! Designing APIs is already not that easy when you design them using your native language. But, it’s even more difficult when using a second one. So let’s see how to avoid design frenglish, itaglish or whateverglish APIs.

Doing an API design review is not only about that, but it will require, sooner or later, to analyze an interface contract. Use the wrong tools to do so, and reviews will become a terrible, never-ending burden. Use the right tools, and you’ll become a formidable machine, doing reviews at light speed, never missing the tiniest problem or question. But, after dozens of reviews, you may realize that, despite using the “right” existing tools, the API space actually lacks API design reviews specialized tools.

Yesterday, I live demoed how I take advantage of the OpenAPI Specification during an API Design review at the API Specification Conference. This session was really live, not recorded like my previous one, and that didn’t totally went well. Though I was quite happy to discover new tricks, I had problems preparing this session and worse I also had problems giving it. Nothing that terrible hopefully, but still terribly annoying and stressful. I need a cathartic post to talk about all that.

API all the things! Whatever the reason, IT optimization or digital transformation, it’s nowadays fairly common to APIfy an existing system, making it available through APIs. What is also very common is to not totally grasp the implications of doing so and especially overlooking complexity, security and capacity concerns.

I regularly participate to CFP (Call For Proposals) aiming to choose a software solution. My role is to analyze solutions from an API perspective. And I do that even if there’s no specific API concern regarding the context in which the CFP is made. Why doing so and what to look at? This should be of interest for people having to choose a solution but also to people proposing them. Indeed, some (corporate) software solution vendors should take this seriously … Unless they want to finish at the bottom of the list.

If you’re an API design reviewer and, like the Who, you got a feeling inside that you can’t explain during an API design review, maybe you’re falling in love with the API designer… or more probably: you’re on the verge of giving an opinion. And that is a problem. What is the role of an API design reviewer? Distort API designs to their liking or objectively analyze them based on facts?

Fifth and last post about my first ever (recorded) live coding session given at the Manning API Conference. Thanks to all the work done, I had a good setup, great visual style, titles over VS Code, speaker’s notes and was able to code at light speed. But I was hesitant and not fast enough when presenting, I needed to train myself and fine tune, optimize or remove content to make things smooth and keep in given time frame. And once again VS Code went to the rescue.

This is the fourth post about my first ever (recorded) live coding session given at the Manning API conference. In this series second post, I listed some problems I encountered and started to solve them in previous post. But there are other problems to solve, one of them was that I was not coding and using VS Code fast enough. In this post, I’ll show you how I solved that using a few VS Code tricks, the most important one being: the absolutely rad custom code snippet feature.