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Building API Products
The document discusses best practices for building effective API products, emphasizing the importance of understanding user needs and designing with customer focus. It outlines key characteristics of good APIs, such as ease of use and maintainability, and provides a structured approach for API design and development. The conclusion highlights the need to ensure that the API aligns with strategic goals and tracks its effectiveness.
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Building API Products
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- 2. James Samuel ~8 yearsof experience making software run #Technical content creator #Engineer #TechLead #Speaker #AWS Community Builder 2 @samueljabiodun @abiodunjames @abiodunjames
- 3. 3 HubOfML Curated newsletter for MLengineers, software engineers, and tech leaders. https://hubofml.substack.com/
- 4. 4 #Join us tochange mobility for good tier.app/jobs
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- 7. API is eatingthe world
- 8. API has continuedto gather popularity, grew by 100% in 2020 Postman: State of the API Report 8
- 9. āŖ Offers APIsto open up services e.g Twitter, Facebook, Salesforce, etc āŖ API-ļ¬rst companies e.g Stripe, Contentful, Twilio, Algolia etc 9
- 10. Good APIs are: āEasy Learn ā Easy to use ā Hard not-easy to misuse ā Easy to read and maintain clients that use them ā Easy to evolve 10
- 11. Good API productsmake life easy 11
- 12. How do youmake life easy?
- 13. Understand the āWhyā andāHowā 13
- 14. āŖ Why doyou want to build an API? āŖ What problem will it solve? āŖ How will the API help me achieve my goals? 14
- 15. Example Goal: Driveusage and monetize internal services 15
- 16. The goal isn'talways obvious ā¦Ask 16
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- 18. ā Vocabularies- Areyour words, terms easy to understand for your users? ā Styles - What protocols are you supporting, Rest or GraphQL? ā Naturalness & Consistency: ā Do your users have to change their usual ways of solving their problems signiļ¬cantly? ā Did you follow established standards and conventions? ā What level of familiarity will you provide? Are you APIs similar to what your users may have used in the past?
- 19. āGreat API productsare designed with rigorous customer focus, a deep understanding of the customers, their needs and desiresā 19
- 20. Approaching API Design āŖIdentify users & activities they want to get done āŖ Break down activities āŖ Create APIs & Validate using a use-case āŖ Build API prototype and client prototype āŖ Validate & Re-iterate 20
- 21. You won't getthe ļ¬rst version of your APIs right. Some lessons can't be learned exclusively by customer interviews. 21
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- 23. Affordance is thatproperty of an object which shows users the actions they can take.
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- 26. What's one ofthe ļ¬rst things you look at with a third party API?
- 27. If youāre providingonly one type of documentation, youāre undeserving your users. 27
- 28. ā Evaluation ā Integration āDebugging
- 29. ā Who areyou creating for? ā What are they trying to achieve? ā Why are you creating this?
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- 31. Instead of focusingon CRUD, focus on goals and the sequence of actions required to achieve them.
- 32. ā Scalability ā Maintainability āSecurity ā Reliability ā Performance ā Security ā Testing
- 33. 33 Your APIs shouldhide complexities and not expose them
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- 35. 35 Can the APIProduct deliver on the strategic goals? Is the API Product quality enough to support the strategic goals? Track Effectiveness
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