9 items tagged “apidesign”
2022
Designing a write API for Datasette
Building out Datasette Cloud has made one thing clear to me: Datasette needs a write API for ingesting new data into its attached SQLite databases.
[... 1493 words]2019
With a sufficient number of users of an API,
it does not matter what you promise in the contract:
all observable behaviors of your system
will be depended on by somebody.
— Hyrum's Law # 21st November 2019, 10:45 pm
2018
With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.
— Hyrum's Law # 11th August 2018, 12:33 am
The way I would talk about myself as a senior engineer is that I’d say “I know how I would solve the problem” and because I know how I would solve it I could also teach someone else to do it. And my theory is that the next level is that I can say about myself “I know how others would solve the problem”. Let’s make that a bit more concrete. You make that sentence: “I can anticipate how the API choices that I’m making, or the abstractions that I’m introducing into a project, how they impact how other people would solve a problem.”
— Malte Ubl # 15th April 2018, 5:23 pm
2017
Implementing Stripe-like Idempotency Keys in Postgres (via) Having clients send “idempotency keys” with API requests in order to be able to safely retry them if something’s goes wrong is a really neat trick for making transactional APIs more robust. Here Brandur Leach talks implementation strategies. # 27th October 2017, 5:51 pm
2010
jQuery 1.4.3 Released. Once again, the thing that impresses me most about this jQuery release is how stable the core API is. Hardly any new methods added, but the existing methods are made faster, more flexible and more predictable. The same as been true for the past several releases as well. It just keeps getting more and more polished. # 17th October 2010, 12:15 am
2009
Unimpressed by NodeIterator. John Resig, one of the most talented API designers I’ve ever come across, posts some well earned criticism of the document.createNodeIterator DOM traversal API. # 19th June 2009, 9:53 pm
The Little Manual of API Design (PDF). A concise, highly readable guide to designing APIs that are “Complete, Easy to learn and memorize, lead to readable code, hard to misuse, and easy to extend”, based on lessons learnt over many years of development of the Qt framework. # 18th May 2009, 10:14 am
2007
Building a JavaScript Library. Slides from John Resig’s Google Tech Talk. Some great tips in here, including: make your APIs orthogonal, look for common patterns, keep things extensible and write the documentation yourself. # 24th August 2007, 4:02 pm