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You can use this page to email Phil Sturgeon and Mike Bifulco about Surviving Other People's APIs.
About the Book
How can you build the best web/mobile/client-side application, when the APIs you need to work with are poorly documented, struggle with sketchy performance, or generally make you feel like you're on a dangerous expidition into an ancient tomb, with hidden booby traps, doors operated by archaic runes, where one wrong move triggers swinging battering rambs to wreck your day into a wall of spikes.
This whole premise of an API client-server relationship is inherently fraught with danger, because going over the network for anything can lead to unexpected errors, unexpected change, connection problems... hell a rat could have chewed through a cable. This book aims to help you not just react to these problems, but ideally prempt them and build an application that laughs in the face of danger.
Just like with Build APIs You Won’t Hate, this book will take a non-academic, easy-to-read approach to some pretty complex topics around HTTP interactions, versioning, client-caching, state management, differences between how you interact with RPC, REST and GraphQL, using JSON Schema for local validation, and all sorts of other awesome stuff that nobody ever bothered to mention to you.
About the Authors
Since 2010 I've worked as a freelancer, consultant, API lead, and CTO for several API-centric technology startups. Working as an internal API consultant for WeWork gave me a lot to write about, where I used my experience of things going horribly horribly wrong to help educate developers, define standards for API design and architecture, and implementing full API design lifecycles so we weren't all just building nonsense and hoping it was useful.
Trying to get loads of different questionably built APIs tidied up, playing nicely, and working quickly was a constant source of learning for me and everyone involved. I took a lot of that learning to Stoplight, and helped plan, build, and manage most of your favourite OpenAPI tools.
When I'm not banging on about APIs I'm riding, racing, or crashing various bikes, or saving the plant through Protect Earth, an environmental charity I co-founded in 2020. We create brand new woodlands, restore and extend ancient woodlands, and run around with machetes getting rid of invasive species.
Mike Bifulco lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, and is the CTO and co-founder of Craftwork (YC S23).
Mike is a developer advocate, writer, podcaster and serial startup founder, and has worked for companies like Google, Stripe, Microsoft, and Gymnasium.
He is also cofounder of APIs You Won't Hate, a community for API Developers on the web.
💌 Tiny Improvements is mike's a weekly newsletter for startup founders, indiehackers, and product builders - you can dinf it at mikebifulco.com/newsletter.