REST API Notes - 2017/12/12
Another week, another business trip. I'm currently in Richmond, VA dodging snow flurries in between discussing 2018 strategy. I count myself lucky working with the team I do; there's a pursuit of honest truths (and holding ourselves accountable to find them) that is precious. I've seen plenty of resume-driven tech strategies. This is where mediocre results drive a madcap pursuit of silver bullets for guns, themselves, only half cocked. The results are outcomes that miss the mark. I've adopted Stefan Tikov's skepticism when I see overwrought declarations on how "REST is over": my first question is whether the "problem" to be "solved" was RESTful to begin with.
There's plenty of depths yet to be plumbed. And, even when those are exhausted, we have the seemingly endless task of applying those lessons correctly. Take Mike Amundsen's slide deck from 2015. Entitled "Optimizing Teams in a Distributed World: Conway's Three Other Laws", the lessons are, themselves, derived from "How Do Committees Invent?". That was published in 1967. Mike was presenting the deck in his swing through Australia (and tweeting the TL;DR lessons) this week. Whether it has been two years, or fifty, good practice is evergreen.
Speaking of good practice, newsletter faves Irakli Nadareishvili and Matt McLarty, among others, co-authored a free, 50-page guide to microservice development available from DZone (login required). This resource attempts to capture a host of best practices for creating, replacing, and scaling pieces of your application.
Michael Leppitsch has an interesting look at API KPIs. Several folks wanted to make sure I saw it, particularly after I recently discussed, in part, our metrics approach. It is a good, if executive-speak heavy, introduction to going beyond simple quantities.
Alaina Kafkes, from Medium, has a fantastic slide deck entitled "Building Beginner-Friendly API Tutorials. An intuitive API design is one thing. But great technical writing, like the type mentioned by Alaina, takes developer experience to a whole 'nother level.
Attention to doing the work around these things - good practice, metrics, developer experience - isn't the quickest way to winning buzzword bingo. But it is how to build a software strategy that delivers lasting value.
MILESTONES
A handful of milestones this week. The first is that the 3.01 version of the OpenAPI spec was released. As implied by the number, its minor (things like typos and a few clarifications) but always good to see the transparency.
Also, API Days Paris has a call for papers open until December 31st. The January 30th and 31st event's theme is "sustainable software with APIs, Microservices, and Containers". If you've got something to share, check it out.
WRAPPING UP
A few 2018 events have been trickling in; head over to webapi.events for more a listing of in-person conferences, meetups, and/or hackathons happening near you. If you don't see an event that should be there let me know; either respond to this directly or send me an email at 'hello@matthewreinbold.com'.
Til next time,
Matthew