Using a web API to provide services to application developers is one of the more satisfying endeavors that software engineers undertake. But building a popular API with a thriving developer ecosystem is also one of the most challenging. With this practical guide, developers, architects, and tech leads will learn how to navigate complex decisions for designing, scaling, marketing, and evolving interoperable APIs.

Authors Brenda Jin, Saurabh Sahni, and Amir Shevat explain API design theory and provide hands-on exercises for building your web API and managing its operation in production. You’ll also learn how to build and maintain a following of app developers. This book includes expert advice, worksheets, checklists, and case studies from companies including Slack, Stripe, Facebook, Microsoft, Cloudinary, Oracle, and GitHub.

Get an overview of request-response and event-driven API design paradigms

Learn best practices for designing an API that meets the needs of your users

Use a template to create an API design process

Scale your web API to support a growing number of API calls and use cases

Regularly adapt the API to reflect changes to your product or business

Provide developer resources that include API documentation, samples, and tools

Brenda Jin is an entrepreneur and software engineer. As a staff engineer on the Slack developer platform team, she designed, built, and scaled APIs for third-party developers. As a board member and chapter leader for Girl Develop It, Brenda has contributed to numerous open source teaching materials and empowered thousands of women to learn web and software development.

Saurabh Sahni is a staff engineer on the developer platform team at Slack. For the last eight years, he has been building and designing developer platforms and APIs. Prior to working at Slack, Saurabh led a team of engineers responsible for Yahoo Developer Network infrastructure and developer tools, where he helped launch Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite and several APIs.

Amir Shevat is a VP of developer experience at Twitch. He has spent the past 15 years building developer products, APIs, and ecosystems around APIs at Slack, Microsoft, and Google. He is also the author of Designing Bots (O’Reilly).