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A comment on Ask HN: How do you notify API consumers of changes?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: How do you notify API consumers of changes? by cimmanom on Thursday May 03, 2018 @11:55AM (#16987079)
I just got bitten by a vendor that changed a business critical API twice in three weeks with neither versioning nor notification. It's very unprofessional.

I strongly second the recommendation to version customer-facing APIs. You should never be releasing backwards-incompatible changes without giving customers the option to upgrade on their own timelines (within reason - its unreasonable to expect you to support an older API for a decade; 3 months is an absolute minimum, though, and I'd recommend more like 18-36 months for enterprise customers; and there can be exceptions for changes that address severe security or data loss defects.)

And yes, at the very least, email communication is appreciated. Even if you're versioning - if you have a customer using an outdated API, you should be warning them that it's deprecated and then again a couple times leading up to EOL.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you notify API consumers of changes? by bellt0wn98121 on Sunday May 06, 2018 @02:59PM (#17007774)
Do you pay this vendor? I'm trying to wrap my head around how a paid vendor is so careless.
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Re:Ask HN: How do you notify API consumers of changes? by cimmanom on Thursday May 10, 2018 @07:08AM (#17037842)
Yup, we pay them.

Support has since informed us that the announcement was in the monthly newsletters we don't read because they're usually all marketing materials.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you notify API consumers of changes? by is_true on Thursday May 03, 2018 @07:28PM (#16990926)
WTF? Is it something critical?
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Re:Ask HN: How do you notify API consumers of changes? by cimmanom on Thursday May 10, 2018 @07:10AM (#17037852)
A hosted build system. It didn't bring our customer-facing business to a halt or anything, but it did grind our QA and deployment process to a standstill at a particularly inconvenient time.
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