200 OK Boomer

Explicit content warning

02/14/20 • 49 min

Phil, Mike and Matt talk about Matt's adventures with APIs returning 200 OK while having an error message in the body, causing extra work and frustration. We look at why this is a common thing in API development and what we can do to help people utilize the codes that are there instead of relying on 200 OK.

Mike brings up Microsoft and what they are doing with their push to not only go Carbon Neutral but also Carbon Negative to make up for their past. We wonder what that will look like, and also bring up what an individual person with a developers salary can do to start helping out more since we (developers) can generally afford it over a lot of other people.

Keeping on the environment, we also take look at some things a developer can do with code to help the environment, particularly around caching and responses.

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Cheers!

Keeping on the environment, we also take look at some things a developer can do with code to help the environment, particularly around caching and responses.

Cheers!

Previous Episode

Ask Us Anything!

A while ago, we put out a call to Twitter to invite listeners to send us their questions and we would answer them. We received 4 really good questions, covering topics like supporting content negotiation, how to craft and and define an SLA for your API, why companies seem to disregard standards when it comes to their API SDKs and should you version hypermedia.

Next Episode

The API Handyman Cometh

Phil and Matt, both in a loose definition of isolation, find time to talk to Arnaud Lauret (https://twitter.com/apihandyman) and talk about API Design and Review. We discuss why you should spend time designing and reviewing your API and the process of reviewing API Designs before the code is written. We also ask Arnaud what he looks for while reviewing, the tools he uses to review API design docs and then Phil starts dreaming up what the ideal API Review tooling looks like.

We also talk about life in quarantine, as France completely shut down and how Phil made it back in time to England before the lock downs took place.

Links:

https://twitter.com/apihandyman - Arnaud's Twitter
https://bit.ly/designwebapis - The Design of Web APIs by Arnaud Lauret
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things - The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
http://apihandyman.io/ - Arnaud's blog
http://apistylebook.com/ - API Stylebook, a collection of API style guides