
Ask HN: API with the best integration experience? - qin
Have you ever integrated against a web service where the experience
was memorably delightful? Which service and what made it so?
======
cutety
I’ve definitely worked with more APIs that I dread working with, but off the
top of my head one of the most pleasant I’ve used has been Rollbar.

At my workplace we own/maintain/create a lot of custom small apps for various
groups, as well as a fewer larger scale ones (and a few of those are pretty
legacy). Prior to Rollbar, we just had random apps kinda using things like
NewRelic, but most of the time if we needed to track an error, it meant diving
into logs. But, getting everything on Rollbar was an absolute breeze, and the
best part (and a sign of a good API/Service) is once the initial setup is
done, that’s literally been it, no constant fussing with configs, service
changes, it’s been set and forget.

The setup process is more-or-less:

1) Add the app from the web UI 2) Install the gem into the Rails app 3) Setup
the token’s for prod/staging environments 4) If the app has a JS frontend, add
the JS package 5) Setup the client token 6) Deploy

And after that all errors are being piped into the dashboard, and (almost) out
of the box, I’ll be able to see the line it occurred at, the trace back, the
IP it came from, the user it occurred with, number of occurrences, and receive
notifications when a shitload of errors starts occurring, all from an easy to
use dashboard. It’s even a bit better for frontend errors, because you can
also see the series of clicks/events the user made leading up to the error.

And a few more clicks in the web UI, you can have it link the errors directly
to your source control and issue tracker.

The “RQL” (SQL-like query language) feature initially didn’t seem that useful,
but overtime it’s actually come in really handy being able to query the errors
in a fairly powerful way.

The documentation is great, they provide official APIs/packages for almost all
popular languages & frameworks (with the caveat being focused on web dev).

Definitely a service I’d recommend to any shop that doesn’t have a solid error
tracking system in place. I can’t think of a single issue I’ve had with the
service in the year+ we’ve been using it.

------
afarrell
Those interested in this topic might be interested in my friend's newsletter
about developer experience: [https://getputpost.co/](https://getputpost.co/)

~~~
ezekg
I'm subscribed to this API newsletter, but I'm not convinced it's still a
thing. I have yet to get a newsletter and I've been subscribed for over a
year. And their last blog post was in 2017, unfortunately.

