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Programmers are so bad with this, this needs to be a more respected aspect of writing software in general. "Well, I comment everything" isn't enough. If you spe

by nothis 9y ago

Programmers are so bad with this, this needs to be a more respected aspect of writing software in general. "Well, I comment everything" isn't enough. If you spent hundreds or thousands of hours on your API, but skimp on the part where you actually look at it from the users' point of view, that's such a colossal waste. You have to multiply the number of future users with the hours wasted on tedious setup hoops and learning confusing naming conventions. I look at the damage bad UX design can do to society, culturally, and I weep. A single bad decision, there, can cause millions of wasted hours.

deleted 9y ago
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enjo 9y ago
Two decades into my career and I absolutely shudder every time I get a request to "integrate with <xxx>'s API, it'll be easy!" It almost never is. Everything about the experience sucks. The documentation is usually a mess and the code flow is usually strange as hell. But I can live with that. It's the completely opaque error states that kill me. The article dedicated an entire section to it and I hope people take it to heart. When I pass bad data or something you're not expecting give me some clue as to what it might be! I just spent 60+ hours working on an integration. 95% of that was spent changing parameters and encodings hoping that something would magically fix the 400 I kept receiving back from the server. It turns out a shared secret had a typo (on my end). The thing is this bad design is costing that company real $$. Not only was it a frustrating experience for me, I took a couple of hours of their engineers time trying to hunt it down. The lack of error handling made it difficult for them to track the issue down on their side as well. I'll never forget the first time I touched Twilio's API. Everything was so clear. I had screwed something up, and got a clear message about what was wrong. It was magic.. and the whole thing was up and running in less than an hour. Give me more of that please!

by nothis 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

enjo 9y ago

Two decades into my career and I absolutely shudder every time I get a request to "integrate with <xxx>'s API, it'll be easy!" It almost never is. Everything about the experience sucks. The documentation is usually a mess and the code flow is usually strange as hell. But I can live with that. It's the completely opaque error states that kill me. The article dedicated an entire section to it and I hope people take it to heart. When I pass bad data or something you're not expecting give me some clue as to what it might be! I just spent 60+ hours working on an integration. 95% of that was spent changing parameters and encodings hoping that something would magically fix the 400 I kept receiving back from the server. It turns out a shared secret had a typo (on my end). The thing is this bad design is costing that company real $$. Not only was it a frustrating experience for me, I took a couple of hours of their engineers time trying to hunt it down. The lack of error handling made it difficult for them to track the issue down on their side as well. I'll never forget the first time I touched Twilio's API. Everything was so clear. I had screwed something up, and got a clear message about what was wrong. It was magic.. and the whole thing was up and running in less than an hour. Give me more of that please!