API Antipatterns: How to identify and avoid them

APIs have become a part of the product ecosystem - and help the businesses by extending their developer base, and offering seamless integration with other services or products. Sometimes, the APIs themselves are the product. However, with so many APIs around, patterns emerge. Patterns are repeatable, reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems. Where there are patterns, there are also antipatterns.

While APIs are not a new paradigm - there are no set standards or specifications formed by a committees or governing bodies for APIs. On top of this, the APIs are often built at various stages of the product, and have a good chance of being disjoint as more are added. In this talk I’ll discuss various antipatterns that creep into the API design and implementation, and how to identify and avoid them. I will also share my experience with building APIs at Netflix as a reference.

While the antipatterns do not pose as big a functional challenge, they can and do impact integration efforts, scalability and performance among other things. After my session, you should be able to get familiar with the best practices around solving the most common patterns, and make your engineers and API consumers happy!