The document discusses the importance of designing beautiful APIs that accurately represent an organization while focusing on user experience. Key principles include keeping APIs simple, using standards, and incorporating small gestures to enhance usability, along with an understanding that APIs are permanent once integrated by customers. The author emphasizes that thoughtful API design is essential, as it significantly impacts customer business operations.

1. simple software solutions to big business problems
Making Software. Better.
Building Beautiful APIsBy Reda Hmeid

2. Who am I
• Technical Architect with Equal Experts
• Start software development career 1999 with ba.com
• Father of 4
• Once a kickboxing champion

3. What are APIs
APIs are remotely accessible software
components

4. History of remote access
CORBA EJBs XML SOAP REST
R
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d
a

5. Some beautiful things

6. Beautiful APIs

7. Complete The Story API

8. 1. Represent your
organisation

9. Beautiful APIs represent what your
organisation is and what it does…but not
how it does it

10. 2. Built for the end user

11. User research is central to delivering beautiful UX.
Beautiful APIs are exactly the same

12. 3. Easy to use

14. How to make them simple
1. Represent your organisation
2. Use standards wherever possible
3. Keep your APIs small

15. 4. Nice APIs

16. The car industry knows nice

17. Small Gestures
Nice APIs are all about the small gestures. Those
things people could do without, but just make
using them that much…nicer.

18. Some small gestures
1. Remember what they last viewed
2. Pre-cache resources
3. Automate, automate, automate

19. 5. Intelligent APIs

20. Introduce enough intelligence into your APIs to
display understanding of your users

21. 6. APIs are forever

22. Lesson number 5
Once customers started building their applications
and systems using our APIs, changing those APIs
becomes impossible, as we would be impacting
our customer’s business operations if we would do
so. We knew that designing APIs was a very
important task as we’d only have one chance to
get it right. 10 Lessons from 10 Years of Amazon Web Services

23. https://www.infoq.com/presentations/stripe-api-pci

24. Final Thoughts…

25. Thank You
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