What would you tell someone building their first API?

Those of you who have built and designed APIs, what would you tell a fairly experienced python developer working on their first one?

I’m working on building my first production one using FastAPI, and I’d appreciate any tips or gotchas from more experienced API developers to help newbies like me to be successful!

Thanks!

Comments

[Max Ong Zong Bao]

To start off with designing and work on the API documentation using either OpenAPI v3 standard or Postman with mockup API first then you head to doing it in development.

After that build your API based upon the mockup API. Which both frontend and backend could do their own thing to follow yours without interdependence of having a actual API be up and running in a dev or staging server.

[rhymes]

Don't worry if you don't get it perfect. HTTP APIs are hard to get right.

Consider using OpenAPI so you'll have an API specification but I see FastAPI supports it ☀️

APIs You Won't Hate it's a good resource full of articles, haven't read the book yet but I plan to - apisyouwonthate.com/blog

Enjoy!