

Practicing Safe Sex with Third-Party APIs  - kendalpeiguss
http://blog.smartbear.com/software-quality/bid/273613/Practicing-Safe-Sex-with-Third-Party-APIs
Lorinda Brandon's preso from the API Strategy conference last month. Be safe! :)
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parfe
This is straight up using sex in an advertisement for a product SoapUI Pro by
Smartbear. Slides 27, 28 and 29 are the only approaching anything that could
be considered content and even calling them content would be generous.

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throwaway125
Agreed, this is a really bad ad. I don't even know what SoapUI does for me and
the slides didn't say anything but _"APIs are dangerous, protect yourself!"_

~~~
goodwink
I had hoped that in place of the final advertisement slide would be a
presentation full of advice and strategies on using 3rd party APIs defensibly.
I'd have been happy to have a few ad slids at the end of /that/ information,
but here the content was just replaced entirely by "use our product to solve
this (and I won't even show you how)."

Lame.

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NateDad
_"every one of us wonders if someone has written an API that can do what
they’re asking for"_

You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.

API: Application Programming _Interface_

API == the interface, not the service. You don't write an API to _do_
something. You write an API as a way to access a _service_ that does
something.

At least have your marketing team use the terminology correctly, if that's
what your product is all about.

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flurdy
The only thing to take with you is that you need automatic regression tests
against 3rd party APIs. That way when they change their behaviour or goes down
you are alerted straight away. Hopefully those test suites would be running
against 3rd parties staging/development environment as well so you are alerted
sooner about feature changes.

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X-Istence
This is an absolutely terrible article/advertisement. While I understand the
reason they used "safe sex", it wasn't required, AND there was no new
knowledge to be gained. Nothing novel, no description of how to solve the
issue of coding against an API that can disappear and how to solve that
problem.

