118: API Ramblings with Phil Sturgeon

Three Devs and a Maybe

In this weeks show we are joined by Phil Sturgeon to discuss all things API development. We start off by mentioning Phil’s new job at WeWork, Startup life/culture and switching between different development philosophies. We move on to highlight how he got into API development, the reasons behind writing the book “Build APIs You Won’t Hate” and a future video-series he has in the pipeline. This leads on to discuss common misconceptions of REST and RPC, API tooling available and the different data-formats present. Finally, we mention the importance of good error-handling within an API (no 200 responses!) and some of the bad-stories he has heard/encountered on the topic.

Show Links

• Phil Sturgeon on Twitter
• PHP Town Hall - Episode 51 - Good Riddance
• API Busters
• Build APIs You Won’t Hate
• API Documentation - Do it First - Phil Sturgeon
• GraphQL vs REST - Overview - Phil Sturgeon
• Fractal - Output complex, flexible, AJAX/RESTful data structures
• rails-api/active_model_serializers
• PHP vs Ruby - Let’s All Just Get Along
• philsturgeon/codeigniter-restclient: A RESTful client CodeIgniter library that can auto-detect the format and request its own.
• Richardson Maturity Model
• Building a Decent API - Phil Sturgeon
• JSON Schema
• JSON-LD - JSON for Linking Data
• GraphQL
• google/protobuf: Protocol Buffers - Google’s data interchange format
• BSON - Binary JSON
• API Blueprint
• RAML
• Swagger
• apiaryio/dredd: Language-agnostic HTTP API Testing Framework
• ngrok - secure introspectable tunnels to localhost
• JSON API — A specification for building APIs in JSON
• The Hypertext Application Language
• Runscope API Testing and Monitoring
• JSON API — Error Handling
• RFC 7807 - Problem Details for HTTP APIs