We've teamed up with James Higginbotham of LaunchAny and Keith Casey of Casey Software to bring you their hand-curated weekly newsletter for API developers. You can subscribe to the API Developer Weekly email newsletter here.
Also, be sure to check out James's and Keith's new book A Practical Approach to API Design on Leanpub. On to the links!
Hot Topics
Pingboard Shares 6 Great Tips Learned From Their API Launch
"Pingboard has released an API to help office managers better access and integrate their employee directory data. Drawing on experience working with Austin, Texas incubator program Capital Factory, the way Pingboard has approached its API provides lessons for other startups offering an API as part of their initial product suite."
Self-descriptive, isn't. Don't assume anything
"With the recent surge of interest in hypermedia APIs I am beginning to see the term “self-descriptive” thrown around quite frequently. Unfortunately, the meaning of self-descriptive is not exactly self-descriptive, leading to misuse of the term."
3scale targets API Consumers with APITools offering
"Earlier this year, 3scale launched APITools targeted at API consumers. InfoQ spoke to Vanessa Ramos, product and marketing lead for APITools at 3scale, regarding the motivation, underlying architecture, use-cases, roadmap and community initiatives around APITools. "
Video: Why Swagger Makes APIs Easier To Describe and Consume
A discussion with a few API experts from API Days in San Francisco about how Swagger is used to create documentation for client and server code.
Digital Ocean API v2.0 Enters Public Beta
"For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been testing a new version of the DigitalOcean API. We’re now excited to invite you to try out our public beta"
The Business of APIs
How APIs can save marginalised telecom firms
"Over The Top (OTT) rivals, such as Google, Skype and Netflix, are cutting into telecom operators' revenues and margins. Customers are happy to pay for content from these players but little of this revenue is reaching telcos, yet they bear the cost of delivery as broadband data services clog their networks. One way for telcos to monetise this traffic is to drive new information-brokered revenue models with partners through open analytic website services APIs."
The Connected K-9
"A post that starts offwith quantified dogs ends up in smart cities and connected bikes. That’s really one of the most amazing parts of the IOT; just how expansive it all really can be."
"7) If you aren’t SaaS and have an Open API, you may not be in this game much longer"
"In the future not all the data of a small business will live in QuickBooks. If an accountant’s chosen dashboard/reporting tool can’t read data from your app, do you think that accountant is going to put their clients on your app? Probably not."
API Development
cURL vs HTTPie on the Command Line for HTTP APIs
"When I want to play around with an API, I usually toss a couple example calls from the command line as an initial test. The go-to application for command line HTTP calls has long been cURL. As handy as cURL is, I was pleased to discover HTTPie, a cURL replacement that is particularly well-suited to JSON-based REST APIs."
Ruby Yaks turns your domain models into Hypermedia resources
A new Rubygem has been released that enables models to be Hypermedia-enabled.
List of 35+ Image APIs for fun and profit
Got images to analyze, modify, sell, or recognize? Or do you need generate images? These APIs might help.
Cloud Watch (from Cloud Developer Weekly Newsletter)
Cloud Trends To Watch Over the Next Year
Several surprising conclusions on recent trends and where they are headed over the next year.
Performance At Scale: SSDs, Silver Bullets, And Serialization
"We all love a silver bullet. Over the last few years, if I were to split the outcomes that I see with Rackspace customers who start using SSDs, the majority of the outcomes fall under two scenarios."
New Relic Open Sources their Docker Deployment Tool Centurion
"Centurion takes containers from a Docker registry and runs them on a fleet of hosts with the correct environment variables, host volume mappings, and port mappings, supporting rolling deployments out of the box."
The Top Automation Tools for Public Cloud at Scale
"As more organizations expand their use of public cloud services, from early-stage startups to the biggest businesses and governments in the world, the problems of cloud computing at scale start to arise."
6 Elements of Highly Successful DevOps Environments
"Like all cultures, DevOps has many variations on the theme. However, most observers would agree that these six capabilities are common to virtually all DevOps environments"
What’s up with Google and Microsoft clouds? Hear from the execs in charge
A podcast covering the latest from Google and Microsoft cloud, and how they plan to battle AWS.
Want to share something?
As always, if you want to chat, share a link, or make a suggestion, feel free to drop us a quick note using Twitter (@launchany and @caseysoftware) or by emailing us at: james@launchany.com.