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Ask HN: In 2018, What makes a good API?
What design considerations or constraints do you consider more important than others these days when designing new api services?
- rl3 8y agoExcellent documentation, stability, and a deprecation date of at least 2020 or better.
- matty_makes 8y agoDocumentation. There are "standards" about REST and other mental frameworks about API's but when it comes down to it, everything is slightly different since there are so many small decisions that affect the end product like pagination and authorization. Documentation with working examples someone can use via curl or Postman (or other API poking tool) is even better. Tech stack doesn't matter, REST, GraphQL, micro services, etc. doesn't matter. People are calling an API to get some work done, they just want to know how to work with it - inputs, what happens and outputs.
- bjourne 8y ago180 seconds (3 minutes) elevator pitch. If the authors can't provide that with EXAMPLES then I'm not interested. Keras does it wonderfully well: https://keras.io/ https://keras.io/
- buboard 8y agoone that doesnt deprecate itself every few months for no added benefit
- hakfoo 8y agoDoes it provide data that fits likely consumption needs? I've seen some APIs which screan "we just mapped the database tables to API calls". This theoretically offers loads of flexibility, but at a cost of performance and ease in the typical case. Think of the difference between GET /orderdetails/12345 and GET /order/1234 GET /customer/2345 GET /product/234 GET /product/345 GET /address/5678 GET /paymentinfo/3456 ...
- softwarefounder 8y agoPragmatism and consistency over ideology.