API Conference 2017 Archiv

Following the provocative title, this talk is an effort to broaden the care put in API Design. API Design is not a task for a loner, genius techie; and rather should welcome people from different areas of expertise. The talk proposes a API Design Methodology to facilitate such a collaboration and presents several API Design Perspectives to aid conscious choices upfront. They are what makes API Thinking at ING.

One of the hardest tasks in computer science is naming things, goes a famous joke. It’s funny because naming is a non-technical task. It involves communicating with other people and gathering what they might need and understand.

Seen by most as a technical interface, API Design, often, is about coughing up an interface specification. With their increasing popularity and use in regulation, APIs are now being embraced by non-technical folks from marketing, legal, branding. In other words, APIs are coming-of-age and start to represent the brand, this requires you to develop another outlook towards API design!

Our API Design Methodology and Design Perspectives provide a structured way to reason about the questions the API is trying to answer, and the identification and prototyping of the primary resources, their interactions and purpose.