Vibhor Mahajan - Spec-First API Development for Agility
What is your experience with designing and building APIs?
I have 14 years of professional software engineering experience contributing to companies ranging from startups to large enterprises.
About a decade of the experience has been dedicated to creating RESTful APIs.
While creating API Designs, implementing and / or consuming and testing them, what challenges have you faced / are facing?
I have faced several challenges over the year:
1. Coaching teams on the REST API conventions and why having a clean and consistent API design is important.
2. Collaborating on the API designs - creating sustainable engineering practices to design and develop the API specs
3. Validating that the API developed meets the API specs
What lessons have you learned with regards to designing and testing APIs?
Designing APIs
1. Having a good user experience and frictionless collaboration is more important than process compliance.
2.
Testing
1. There is modern tooling available to validate the API spec compliance for the implementation. Dev teams should leverage these.
2. Good unit tests can do wonders for API development. More so since the advent of microservices.
3. Having tighter feedback loops are essential for Agile teams
What do you plan to learn /explore at this conference?
I would love to discuss the challenges that I have faced at work related to API Design and testing with the practitioners present at the conference.
How do you plan to contribute?
I plan to contribute by actively engaging with both the speakers during the sessions and the participants during the break-out sessions.
Call for Papers CLOSED
Ended on Oct 30 '22 11:59 PM IST
In our experience, having participants write a position paper before coming to the conference leads to better discussion because people have thought about what they want from the conference. Last thing we want is to spend half of the conference time figuring out what you want to figure out.
A Position Paper is a simple paragraph which answers the following questions:
- What's your experience with designing and building APIs?
- While creating API Designs, implementing and / or consuming and testing them, what challenges have you faced / are facing?
- What lessons have you learned with regards to designing and testing APIs?
- What do you plan to learn /explore at this conference?
- How do you plan to contribute?
* Note that the above questions are just pointers, you don't have to answer each one point by point.
