The state of API design
Thoughtworks Technology Podcast
Thoughtworks
4.5 • 58 Ratings
🗓️ 15 November 2018
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
RESTful APIs quickly established themselves as useful architectural style for replatforming legacy systems with web-based ones. But increasingly, developers are running into the boundaries of deploying REST and API purity — confronting real world issues such as the rapid evolution of APIs for frontend layers where connectivity is patchy and where APIs should meet the changing visual representation and behavior of the frontend, where we increasingly see the adoption of alternatives such as GraphQL.
In this episode, co-hosts Mike Mason and Zhamak Dehghani are joined by Brandon Byars, Market Technical Principal at ThoughtWorks North America and James Gregory, Tech Lead at ThoughtWorks Australia to explore the current state of API design and look at the impact of event-based architectures.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone and welcome to another ThoughtWorks podcast. My name is Mike Mason and with me here. |
| 0:09.6 | My co-host is Jamak Deghani. Hi, Jammak. Hi, Mike. |
| 0:14.0 | And we have Brandon Byers with us who's a tech principal from ThoughtWorks, and also James Gregory, who's |
| 0:23.5 | joining us all the way from Australia today. |
| 0:25.4 | Brandon, would you introduce this off for the purposes of the podcast today? |
| 0:29.0 | Sure. Thanks, Mike. |
| 0:30.6 | So I have been a long time tech principal at ThoughtWorks actually 10 years, which is nice in |
| 0:36.9 | terms of getting sabbatical here shortly. |
| 0:39.1 | I've led some fairly large accounts. In recent years, I helped bootstrap the digital |
| 0:44.8 | platform strategy offering along with Ryan Murray and on it call. In that role, I've played an API |
| 0:50.5 | SME across a couple of accounts in North America, a platform architectural once or twice. |
| 0:56.6 | And I've done a fair amount of gnarly API work in telcos, retail marketing science and airlines. |
| 1:03.3 | And right now I'm working with an oil and gas company here in Houston trying to find a way out of SAP. |
| 1:09.1 | And they seem to think APIs are three-letter silver bullet |
| 1:11.9 | for that. I have a book coming out this summer on testing microservices and maintain the |
| 1:17.0 | Maldi Bank open source project. Great. Thanks, Brandon. And James, would you introduce yourself? |
| 1:23.3 | So I'm a developer in tech lead out of Sydney. As a tech lead, I tend to be one of the first |
| 1:29.5 | people to drop onto projects when we're kicking them off, especially one of the first technical |
| 1:34.1 | people. And that means that I am often involved in all of those early design decisions and |
| 1:40.7 | discussions about what our systems are going to look like, what the infrastructure is going to be like, and how our APIs are going to be designed and integrate. I've worked a lot |
| 1:48.9 | with small to medium-sized organizations like startups and SaaS providers looking to expose APIs |
| 1:56.2 | to the public and then plenty of kind of B2B or internal technology companies looking to build up |
... |
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