Tom CardenJan 8, 2023

Thoughtful tech friends, if you were building a developer-facing API from scratch today what tech and SaaS would you use to get to market quickly with a quality product?

And: what features and considerations are “table stakes” for you to consider using someone else’s API?

#tech #apis #saas

Show threadMichael OrtaliJan 8, 2023

@randometc

1. High Availability.
2. Latency.
3. Security (level depends on dataset).
4. Feature Rich.
5. SDKs.

Then as the company mature: avoiding breaking changes, metrics, etc.

Show threadMichael OrtaliJan 8, 2023
@randometc I would stay away from REST APIs and directly do RPC. Apply common principles (CRUD operations), and benefit from the flexibility. You also get SDKs generated for free.
Show threadTom CardenJan 8, 2023
@xethorn interesting. Would you use gRPC (or GraphQL) or just RPC-ish over HTTP? I remember using XML-RPC back in the day and I think it would require shipping an SDK to make it palatable for most developers.
Show threadMichael Ortali
@randometc gRPC solves a lot of this. Your question about GraphQL is interesting. It depends on your problem space. Are you building your APIs for backend integrations, or for mobile / web clients?
Jan 8, 2023 at 3:22pmWeb
Show threadTom CardenJan 8, 2023
@xethorn backend majority, maybe very simple frontends with 1-3 calls.
Show threadMichael OrtaliJan 8, 2023
@randometc I'd start small (gRPC), then add a GraphQL layer when things become more stable.