Give it a REST - Tips for Designing and Consuming Public APIs

Explore best practices for designing and consuming public REST APIs in this comprehensive conference talk. Learn from real-world experiences at Huddle, covering topics such as initial API design, extensibility, versioning, async operations, rate limiting, deprecation handling, and backend for frontends. Discover strategies for maintaining a usable API while keeping clients happy, including tips on consuming APIs reliably, coping with changes, and understanding caching. Gain insights into common pitfalls and practical solutions for both API creators and consumers, addressing challenges in moving from monolithic applications to microservices-based architectures.

Syllabus

Intro
Is that really REST?
Anatomy of a REST request
Anatomy of a REST response
API design - where do you start?
An API is a contract
Versioning an API
Extending an API
How do we introduce breaking changes?
Elegant deprecation
BFF - for compatibility and tailoring
Using links to construct a user interface
Hypermedia UI (consumer/publisher)
Caching - 304 Not Modified
Last-Modified header (producer)
Rate limiting - 429 Too Many Requests
Async and REST
Updating FileRequest status
Over consuming (consumer)
Enumerated values (consumer)
Relying on link order (consumer)
Be specific (consumer)
Resources