Intuitive APIs and Developer Education

Bear Douglas

Slack

Director of Developer Relations

API standards, from SOAP to REST to GraphQL, have evolved to meet the needs of API providers and developer consumers. They make APIs intuitive by making them predictable. When product designs bump up against the constraints of standards, you can choose to force a fit or, you can break from convention and invest in educating developers about your choices. Through case studies (including Facebook's Open Graph and Slack's workspace apps project), we'll examine the tradeoffs, consequences, and some learnings about how to get your developer community to come along with you.