Tag: apis
Steal these ideas to build new products
Pouring through an extensive list of publicly accessible APIs to find new ideas for your next product.
Steal these ideas to build new products
Pouring through an extensive list of publicly accessible APIs to find new ideas for your next product.
Effective interfaces decouple clients from the encapsulated implementation
Postel's Law
Why 'be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept' still shapes APIs and parsers, and where it breaks.
What makes an API simple?
Explores the tradeoffs in API design between minimal request inputs and richer contextual data. Argues that 'simple' should mean simple to use correctly, not just simple to look at. When an API encapsulates business logic, shifting complexity onto the API can reduce errors for consumers.
Learning in hallways (with APIs)
I can't let Clay Shirky's piece, Napster, Udacity and the Academy, go un-commented-on: Open systems are open. For people used to dealing with institutions that go out of their way to hide their flaws, this makes these systems look terrible at first. But anyone who has watched a piece of open source software improve, or remembers the Britannica people throwing tantrums about Wikipedia, has seen how blistering public criticism makes open systems better. And once you imagine educating a thousand p
The Edinburgh Festivals API: a case study in innovation
I was the inaugural Geek in Residence at the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab, working with Rohan Gunatillake and the Edinburgh Festivals on open data and digital accessibility. Here's a video from Rudman Consulting for AmbiTIon Scotland about the Festivals API portion of the project:
httpID: adding identity to standard HTTP requests
This is a more technical post than I've been writing lately. I'm considering splitting out into two blog channels; let me know if you'd prefer this. This is a request for comments and ideas. Please let me know what you think in the comments. Thanks! One of the advantages of the decentralized social web, as opposed to a social network (federated or otherwise), is that identity can, theoretically, be shared with any web page, anywhere. That page doesn't have to be running any particular software
The Open Stack and truly open APIs
The following is an expanded version of the short talk I gave in Oxford yesterday. My original slides follow the transcript. There’s a new kind of web development afoot, which marries old-school object-orientated programming techniques with the distributed power of the web. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are published sets of instructions for programmatically querying or extending a service. For example, the Google Maps API allows anyone with some development skills to build applica