Building your API stack

The DrumKit API started as a weekend project so our own team could export tokens from a script. Four years later it serves a few million requests a day, and most of what we learned is about restraint.

We version by date, never break a field without a year’s notice, and document every endpoint with a request you can paste into a terminal. We test the docs the way we test the code, so an example that stops working fails a build.

If you are building an API of your own, start with the three calls your users make most, make those boring and fast, and wait for the fourth to be asked for.