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Twitch has one of the worst developer experience I've seen. I developed a set of tools ~6 years ago and they get broken by API changes twice a year. Meanwhile m
by ehsankia 4y ago
Twitch has one of the worst developer experience I've seen. I developed a set of tools ~6 years ago and they get broken by API changes twice a year. Meanwhile my similar set of Steam tools have been running smoothly for a decade. They just love changing their APIs left and right, often without fully supporting all the previous functionality. They arbitrarily many functions harder on the developer for no reason (like how you now have to manually convert username into userid).
Also, since they switched their own internal API to GraphQL, they basically stopped caring about the developer API. That's the #1 thing, if a website doesn't use the same API that it provides developers, then chances are the API will be shit.
- hashworks 4y agoCould you elaborate on things Valve does right? Simple API versioning and LTS of old versions you use or more extended stuff?
- 22c 4y agoSteam APIs have not significantly changed in the last 15 or so years. They're not exactly well documented, but they are relatively well understood because they haven't changed. I'd say what they did right is simply not break existing functionality.
- ehsankia 4y agoExactly this. It feels like Twitch changes things for the sake of changing them. There is not reason why their changes couldn't have been backward compatible. It's just unnecessary churn for developers, who often are working for free making tools for your website.