Designing APIs: Less Data is More
summary
Designs a minimal blogging platform (authors, posts, comments) and claims smaller APIs save real work: exposing an email field forces deprecation cycles and client coordination, adding a reviewer relationship creates N+1 and performance costs, making update-comment accept a post_id invents unsupported UI flows, and omitting pagination limits becomes a scaling bug. Advocates schema-first, iterative delivery, redundant fields elimination and a strict to loose policy so additions are cheap and removals avoid breaking clients.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (6)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:03Dont expose redundant fields
- 7:06Dont expose redundant relationships
- 11:53Dont expose redundant input fields
- 15:30Avoid extra flexibility
- 18:36Defensive programming
related talks
24mBuild The API First
35mBroken APIs Break Trust: Tips for Creating and Updating APIs
32mRefactoring Legacy Apps with APIs and Messages
42mLightweight Web Services
44mDesigning Hypermedia APIs
38mDesigning a Great Ruby API - How We're Simplifying Rails 5
33mUniformity ain't all bad getting consistent behavior across your API
17mDesigning software that maximizes developer productivity
