Musings of a product manager / developer / api evangelist
This website does not exist.. well, at least not until you look at it. The site you're currently looking at is hosted entirely inside an AWS Serverless (Lambda) function. The content, the scripts, and the CSS styles are all made available instantly when you request the site, and then subsequently destroyed when no one is looking. Even the content management system (Netlify CMS) is bundled inside the Lambda, which runs completely serverless!
I've been designing, building and managing APIs for the best part of the last 10 years. In that time I've discovered a bunch of tools and sites that have been really useful. This post provides a single point of reference for these tools.
Over the years I've found a handful of commands that I always come back to. I'm using this blog post as a reference so I don't have to keep googling for them!
I created a fork of the open source Swagger Editor to try and make it easier to save and version OAS definitions. This project is no longer functional, however this post describes some of the technology that was used and is here for archive purposes.
Have you ever noticed how the best APIs on the market seem to provide a simple elegant and clean interface to the data? Developers and API designers take note - this does not happen by accident.
There are so many ways to secure APIs that it can be easy to choose the wrong one. My takeaway is to understand the perspective of your users to help you choose the right approach. This post explores some of the lessons learned during the design of the Whispir API back in 2013.
When I was asked to design our API my first step was to watch "Teach a Dog to REST" by Brian Mulloy. Then watch it again, and again. I made other members of the team watch it, and took as much as I could from it. This post goes into my interpretations from that video and what I did to design the APIs at Whispir.
One thing every enterprise API creator needs to think about at some point prior to the API going to production is whether an API Management Platform is required. This post goes into a few details that you need to consider when choosing an API Management Platform.