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APIs

Understanding Core REST principles

Understanding Core REST principles

When people talk about REST, they often focus on surface level characteristics: URLs that look clean, JSON payloads, and HTTP verbs used “correctly”. While these elements are visible and important, they are not what makes an API RESTful and it’s not what REST is all about. REST is defined

Naming REST API Resources the Right Way

Naming REST API Resources the Right Way

The two, often cited, most difficult things in Computer Science are cache invalidation and naming things. I'm afraid both are unavoidable when building web applications and APIs are also part of web applications. In this post we will focus on the later as resource names are not internal

Identifying Resources from Requirements

Identifying Resources from Requirements

Resources do not come from databases, frameworks, or other existing ways of modeling data. They come from requirements. More specifically, they come from understanding what users want to do and what concepts they talk about when describing their needs and identifying the different roles. The best way, in my experience,

Thinking in Terms of Resources Instead of Tables

Thinking in Terms of Resources Instead of Tables

One of the most significant mental shifts in API design is moving away from database-driven thinking. We often start by designing APIs around tables, schemas, or ORM models. While this approach may feel natural, it leads to brittle APIs that expose internal structure and limit evolution in the future. In

What REST really is (and what it isn’t)

What REST really is (and what it isn’t)

One of the most common ways to implement dynamic web applications is by separating the client from the server. We usually write the clients using a frontend stack, which is basically HTML, CSS and some Javascript, and the backend using a server-side technology, these days Python and Typescript seem to