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Do you have any tips on how someone can craft persuasive arguments which lead a manager or their team to start seeing API design as valuable?
by afarrell 6y ago
Do you have any tips on how someone can craft persuasive arguments which lead a manager or their team to start seeing API design as valuable?
- gedy 6y agoReally need to couch in terms of "value" to the individuals and org - point to bugs/regressions caused by loose interfaces, copy pasted code, able to use cool tools if you follow REST, JSON-API, GraphQL, etc. Most folks seem totally unpersuaded by "maybe one day 3d parties will use this API!" hypotheticals.
- afarrell 6y agoThe hard part about this is learning what individuals and organisations find valuable.
- bobbiechen 6y agoIt really depends. Who is the API for? I agree with the sibling comment that showing concrete failures that were caused by or contributed to by poor API design is effective. If it's a public (customer-facing) API, perhaps you can compare your version to a competitor's: to achieve the same task, what needs to be done? Internally... I haven't had a lot of luck here. Push for it in code/design reviews and sneak a refactor into your PRs? One thing that helps is to have ready examples, so you can say "Hey, I think we need a higher level abstraction here or else we'll be copy-pasting around the same 12 calls every time we want to X, just like we already do with Y API." and your teammates hopefully recognize that pain.