Show Notes
Your connection drops mid-checkout on a $1,000 ticket. Do you hit refresh and risk paying twice? The answer lives in the invisible architecture of REST APIs. In this deep dive we go from the basic grammar of the web to the patterns that keep global platforms fast, safe and reliable.
You'll learn: - What REST really is, and why verbs never belong in your URLs - Resource naming, the two-level nesting rule, and when to flatten - Honest HTTP status codes and error responses with trace IDs - API versioning: URI vs headers vs content negotiation - Why offset pagination breaks at scale, and how cursors fix it - Safe vs idempotent methods, and how idempotency keys prevent double charges - Authentication vs authorization, OAuth 2.0, and the trade-offs of JWTs - ETags, sparse fieldsets, compression and 202 Accepted for long-running jobs - Rate-limit headers and the token bucket algorithm - The Richardson Maturity Model, HATEOAS, and API governance with OpenAPI
Chapters 00:00 The $1,000 refresh dilemma 00:45 "It works" vs "it's designed well" 01:31 What REST really is 02:17 Resources: nouns and verbs 03:04 REST vs RPC 03:52 Nesting and flattening resources 05:28 Honest status codes 06:16 The status code vocabulary 08:36 Error responses that help you fix things 10:10 API versioning strategies 11:44 Why offset pagination breaks 12:53 Cursor-based pagination 14:03 Securing filters 14:38 Safe and idempotent methods 16:02 Idempotency keys 16:50 Authentication vs authorization 17:37 JWT trade-offs 19:11 Caching with ETags 20:22 Sparse fieldsets and compression 21:08 Long-running jobs with 202 Accepted 21:31 Rate-limit headers 22:16 Rate-limiting algorithms 23:28 The Richardson Maturity Model 24:14 HATEOAS in theory and practice 25:24 API governance 26:35 Three golden rules 27:22 Final thought
#RESTAPI #APIDesign #BackendEngineering #SoftwareArchitecture #SystemDesign #InterviewPrep
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