Author James Higginbotham explains his five principles of good API design to me. We discuss the importance of empathy, discovery, and use cases in documentation. James advises dealing with API sprawl and ways to deliver SDKs and libraries as part of your developer experience.
Key Takeaways:
- Focus on empathy, discovery, and understanding the problem when designing APIs
- Documentation should focus on use cases and scenarios with an outside perspective
- Plan for APIs to last; don't design them in isolation
- Manage API sprawl through mapping, leveraging existing APIs, and unified front ends
- Evaluate business needs carefully when retiring APIs and transition users smoothly
- SDKs and libraries can come from API providers and the community or be generated by individual consumers.
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