Two decades into my career and I absolutely shudder every time I get a request to "integrate with <xxx>'s API, it'll be easy!"
It almost never is.
Everything about the experience sucks. The documentation is usually a mess and the code flow is usually strange as hell. But I can live with that.
It's the completely opaque error states that kill me. The article dedicated an entire section to it and I hope people take it to heart. When I pass bad data or something you're not expecting give me some clue as to what it might be!
I just spent 60+ hours working on an integration. 95% of that was spent changing parameters and encodings hoping that something would magically fix the 400 I kept receiving back from the server.
It turns out a shared secret had a typo (on my end).
The thing is this bad design is costing that company real $$. Not only was it a frustrating experience for me, I took a couple of hours of their engineers time trying to hunt it down. The lack of error handling made it difficult for them to track the issue down on their side as well.
I'll never forget the first time I touched Twilio's API. Everything was so clear. I had screwed something up, and got a clear message about what was wrong. It was magic.. and the whole thing was up and running in less than an hour.
It almost never is.
Everything about the experience sucks. The documentation is usually a mess and the code flow is usually strange as hell. But I can live with that.
It's the completely opaque error states that kill me. The article dedicated an entire section to it and I hope people take it to heart. When I pass bad data or something you're not expecting give me some clue as to what it might be!
I just spent 60+ hours working on an integration. 95% of that was spent changing parameters and encodings hoping that something would magically fix the 400 I kept receiving back from the server.
It turns out a shared secret had a typo (on my end).
The thing is this bad design is costing that company real $$. Not only was it a frustrating experience for me, I took a couple of hours of their engineers time trying to hunt it down. The lack of error handling made it difficult for them to track the issue down on their side as well.
I'll never forget the first time I touched Twilio's API. Everything was so clear. I had screwed something up, and got a clear message about what was wrong. It was magic.. and the whole thing was up and running in less than an hour.
Give me more of that please!