Category Archives: Opinion

The Swedish API License

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Developer Experience is important, and that includes much more than the technical design of an API. It also includes the documentation and support as well as the pricing and the legal licensing terms. In almost every API project I have been involved in the legal details have been slapped on last-minute, usually by a lawyer that does not know anything about APIs or technology.

There are also way too many examples of API licensing terms that are actively developer hostile, which does not really invite developers to use the API (assuming they read the terms of service that is).

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Why no one wants to use your API

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A brilliant, undiscovered app developer just logged into the front page for your API program (please don’t tell me you just emailed a PDF), and made their first successful call. They’re frustrated, feeling like they don’t understand what just happened, and generally just exhausted.

Hopes of impressing colleagues with a quick demo espousing the ease of adoption have been dashed. They are eagerly digging through your content trying to find a way to explain the value of what your API brings to his company.

This is too hard!

…you might be about to lose out on the most serendipitous moment in your companies’ future. Developers you have never met might have the potential to change your future…but only if it’s easy to get started.
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Tictail API launch focuses on UX

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Tictail, a Swedish e-commerce platform that manages over 24,000 stores spread across 110 different countries, launched their API on September 16, 2013. Because Tictail’s main focus is simplicity of use, they decided to offer developers the same tools they use internally to build this new platform. According to Carl Waldekranz, Tictail CEO, they “want developers to have that same opportunity as [the company] continues to grow internationally.”

TictailDeveloperPortal

Their developer platform includes the API but also their open application store, which is where all the action is for companies that want to make money selling apps. The whole project took them 3 months to carry out and everything is being managed without any external tools. Continue reading “Tictail API launch focuses on UX” »

Webhooks, REST and the Open Web

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Back in 2006, Jeff Lindsay proposed a different way of consuming Web resources that would eliminate the need for constantly polling APIs for changes. This new pattern was called webhooks and has since been adopted by companies such as GitHub and Google.

REST and webhooks are two sides of the same coin. In “Web Hooks and the Programmable World of Tomorrow“, Jeff Lindsay, October 2008

The main advantage of the webhooks pattern is that your application doesn’t have to make periodic calls to APIs while it’s waiting for changes. Instead, APIs will call your application on a specific endpoint informing that something interesting has happened. What’s missing is a way to programmatically tell APIs that you’re interested in receiving calls and registering endpoints.

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When API time zones make the difference

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Globalizing APIs is hard. I’ve posted before about some of the pitfalls of dates and times in APIs in The 5 Laws of API Dates and Times, as well as content and currency localization in How to Localize Your API .
One area that I did not get into was how timezones can play a role when a specific time and location are in play.

Simply put: you cannot tell what the UTC offset of a given date+time will be, unless you know precisely where and when it will be. As such, this becomes the defining line for when we should supply timezones.

Time zones around the world
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