The OpenAPI Specifications Conference for 2021 was held on September 28 and 29. The conference, sponsored by the OpenAPI Initiative, featured speakers from companies and organizations who offered insight into the problems inherent in creating APIs, publishing them in a manner that makes them findable by developers, describing the rules that govern the API, and the history and current direction of API specification. The opening keynote by Mandy Whaley and Yina Arenas cited the need for change in API specification…
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Diving into OpenAPI 3.1
In the past decade API’s have proliferated. Companies sought increased efficiency through automated business-to-business transaction processing using APIs; web-based companies created APIs to enable developers to integrate their data products into new processes; and new companies were created that pulled data from multiple external APIs and fused it into their own processing to produce unique web products that offered potential audiences a view of meshed data that wasn’t available elsewhere. The pandemic accelerated this trend, as people working from home were no longer able to easily and securely connect to the corporate intranet to accomplish their tasks. As the number of available APIs mushroomed, problems arose…
Continue readingSlack Proves that the Impact of COVID on Technology Professionals Is Permanent
It was major news when Slack experienced a global outage on January 4, 2021, the first work day of the new year. The Associated Press article Slack kicks off 2021 with a global outage reported: “It’s the latest tech glitch to show how disruptive technical difficulties can be when millions of people are depending on […]
Continue readingThe Impact of COVID on APIs
A lot has changed in 2020. The entire world economy has been altered, likely permanently. It has been discovered that many technology workers can effectively work remotely. Not everyone can do this well. The in-office interaction between people is highly beneficial for productivity. But, it appears that those advantages are largely going to be discarded […]
Continue readingA New World for Small Start-Ups
The headlines are everywhere. Here are some recent ones from the Wall Street Journal: “Companies and Cities Adjust to a Remote Work Force” (8 June 2020). “San Francisco’s Office Market Cools as Startups Retrench” (early June 2020). “Once Booming, San Francisco Apartment Market Reverses” (19 June 2020). “Another Exodus Ahead for U.S. Cities?” (20 June 2020). “Covid-19 Derails Retirement Dreams” (11 June 2020). What does this mean for a creative technology entrepreneur who has a great idea, but has not yet implemented it?
Continue readingWhy Does Tail Latency Matter?
It’s a complicated question, actually: latency versus throughput. Throughput is how many responses you can give to your varied customers in a certain amount of time. Latency is the amount of time it took for an individual customer to receive the response to their request. If your product is going to succeed, obviously you need […]
Continue readingFive Ways to Help Your Developers Analyze API Outages
When your product relies on APIs (external or internal), it is critical that you monitor those APIs in order to know when something goes awry that affects your customer’s perception of your product’s current status. There are many ways an API can be down and or adversely affect your product. An external API may simply […]
Continue readingUsing Javascript to Extract Information from SOAP API Responses
My last post described how to create a monitor that calls Flickr’s Interestingness SOAP API to retrieve a list of recently uploaded photos that Flickr users have found interesting. Once the list of interesting photos is retrieved, we might want to call other Flickr API endpoints to retrieve more detailed information about the individual photos. […]
Continue readingMonitoring Flickr’s Interestingness SOAP API
The API Science platform provides capability for monitoring APIs that utilize SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) interfaces. The photo sharing site Flickr offers a substantive API that can be accessed using multiple protocols, including SOAP. In this article series I’ll use the Flickr API to illustrate techniques that can be applied for monitoring the status and performance of SOAP-based APIs. Flickr invented a metric they call interestingness, which ranks posted photos based on statistics including clickthroughs, comments, favorites, tags…
Continue readingThe Business Case for Excellent API Documentation
If your company is selling web services that are accessed by through APIs, one of the most important factors for your ability to attract paying customers is your API documentation. Management teams from potential customers will be interested in what information your APIs provide, their capacity and reliability, and how quickly they can scale. Once […]
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