Using a web API to provide services to application developers is one of the more satisfying endeavors that software engineers undertake. But building a popular API with a thriving developer ecosystem is also one of the most challenging. With this practical guide, developers, architects, and tech leads will learn how to navigate complex decisions for designing, scaling, marketing, and evolving interoperable APIs.

Authors Brenda Jin, Saurabh Sahni, and Amir Shevat explain API design theory and provide hands-on exercises for building your web API and managing its operation in production. You’ll also learn how to build and maintain a following of app developers. This book includes expert advice, worksheets, checklists, and case studies from companies including Slack, Stripe, Facebook, Microsoft, Cloudinary, Oracle, and GitHub.

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• •  Get an overview of request-response and event-driven API design paradigms
• •  Learn best practices for designing an API that meets the needs of your users
• •  Use a template to create an API design process
• •  Scale your web API to support a growing number of API calls and use cases
• •  Regularly adapt the API to reflect changes to your product or business
• •  Provide developer resources that include API documentation, samples, and tools
  
  From the Preface

Building a popular developer platform with an API that is used by millions of developers is one of the most challenging and exciting endeavors you can undertake in your software career. In this book, you’ll learn how to do that.
 

APIs are at the core of modern software development. They tackle a basic developer challenge: how can I, as a software engineer, expose the code I’ve written to other developers to use and innovate with? Building software in the modern world is very much like building with LEGO bricks. As a developer you have access to a vast set of APIs that expose services such as payments, communication, authorization and authentication, and so forth. When building new software, your job as a software engineer is to use these APIs to compose your new product, reusing code that others built in order to save time and avoid reinventing the wheel.
 

Although APIs have become a commodity and using them an easy task, building an API is still an art form. Do not take this challenge lightly; building a solid API is not easy. APIs should be brilliantly simple and highly interoperable—like with LEGO, each part from any kit should work well with every other piece in any other kit.
 

APIs should also be accompanied by developer programs and resources to help developers adopt them. Building a solid API is just the first step; you also need to create and support a thriving ecosystem of developers. We cover these challenges in the last part of this book.

We wrote this book because we realized that over the course of our careers we had followed similar processes and made similar decisions, processes, and optimizations for many APIs, but these guidelines had not been compiled into a single authoritative resource. We could each point to blog posts or articles here and there about separate topics, but there wasn’t one place that described how to design for the evolution and growth of web APIs and their ecosystems. With this book, we hope to put at your fingertips all the tools that we’ve created and discovered over the course of our careers building APIs. Having access to this skill set is very valuable. It can be the difference between the success and failure of your business or technology, and it can be the unique advantage that will drive your career.

About the Author

Brenda Jin is an entrepreneur and software engineer. As a staff engineer on the Slack developer platform team, she designed, built, and scaled APIs for third-party developers. As a board member and chapter leader for Girl Develop It, Brenda has contributed to numerous open source teaching materials and empowered thousands of women to learn web and software development.

Saurabh Sahni is a staff engineer on the developer platform team at Slack. For the last eight years, he has been building and designing developer platforms and APIs. Prior to working at Slack, Saurabh led a team of engineers responsible for Yahoo Developer Network infrastructure and developer tools, where he helped launch Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite and several APIs.

Amir Shevat is a VP of developer experience at Twitch. He has spent the past 15 years building developer products, APIs, and ecosystems around APIs at Slack, Microsoft, and Google. He is also the author of Designing Bots (O’Reilly).