Re:What’s your API’s “Time To 200”?
by robalfonso on Saturday May 22, 2021 @01:42PM
(#27248697)
I seriously discount your api if I can't do my initial review via curl. As the author stated, having to do all this setup creates friction, your api is supposed to be solving a problem for me. If it just creates different problems you're not offering a good solution. If I can quickly see how it works via curl it will be that much easier to evaluate.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Also please have an example API key that actually works. There are some ways to do this depending on your use case
- Have a rotating example key in your docs that rotates once a week.
- Have the example API key return redacted data, example data, or old data instead of real data instead of failing out as an invalid key.
- Add something to the response that doesn't make it usable in production (e.g. a TTS API response can have some duck noises in the background for the example key)
- Limit the total number of requests per IP address to something that's usable for dev work but not usable in production
It reduces a LOT of friction for the user to be able to just curl something off your website instead of going through the whole registration process to get the first 200.
Re:What’s your API’s “Time To 200”?
by robalfonso on Saturday May 22, 2021 @06:20PM
(#27250786)
Agreed, extra credit when the docs use the key from your account so that you can just grab strait from the docs, I think it's stripe who I'm thinking of who does that, sooooo nice.