As a software developer today it is pretty difficult to avoid working with HTTP in some capacity. There also seems to be a growing desire among developers to get a deeper understanding of the protocol. Recently Glenn Block and I decided it might be interesting to do an online Q&A about HTTP and try and answer developer […]
It is true three women can’t make a baby in 3 months, but it also doesn’t take 27 months for them to have 3 babies! You might be wondering what on earth I am talking about but this is something I see API developers getting confused about regularly. There is oft-repeated guidance that if an API […]
Over the past few years, I have occasionally dreamed about what would be my perfect job. Of course it would have to involve HTTP APIs. But beyond that, my background in ERP software leaves me longing for solving business problems for users. My experience at Runscope as a developer advocate reaffirmed my desire to spend […]
Sometimes I do my best thinking in the car and today was an excellent example of this. I had a phone call today with a the digital agency Authentic who have been hired to help you stop saying Swagger, when you mean OpenApi. Iām only partially kidding. They asked me some hard questions about why I got involved in […]
When building HTTP based applications we are limited to a small set of HTTP methods in order to achieve the goals of our application. Once our needs go beyond simple CRUD style manipulation of resource representations, we need to be a little more creative in the way we manipulate resources in order to achieve more […]
In Phil Sturgeonās article Understanding REST and RPC for HTTP APIs, he makes the assertion that the following URL is not technically RESTful.POST /trips/123/start I have made a habit of countering these assertions of ānon-restfulnessā with the following question: Can you point to the REST constraint that is violated and the negative system effects due […]
I’ve spent a large part of the last two years playing the role of a technical marketeer. Call it developer advocate, API Evangelist, or my favourite title, API Concierge, my role was to engage with developers and help them, in any way I could, to build better HTTP APIs. I have really enjoyed the experience […]
Although I know my HTTP and Web API pretty well, becoming an API Evangelist on the Azure API Management team means also needing to know the nitty gritty of the Azure API Management product too. In my learning process I have discovered a wealth of useful information, but it is scattered around a little. Some is on the Azure documentation site, some on […]
In my experience, once a SOAP API gets into production and is working, nobody wants to touch it. They can be very finicky beasts. Sometimes the most innocuous update can stop a client application in its tracks. Exposing a SOAP API to external customers just raises the risk level. One approach I frequently see is […]