API quality checks

🔍 Things to check about a public API before you invest significant amount of time and potentially vendor-lock yourself by building a larger integration to your business:

- ✅ The quality of the documentation: is it well searchable, fast…
- ✅ Is there an SDK? (not necessary but it’s a good sign)
- ✅ Is it conventional? Is there GraphQL, JSON:API, REST…
- ✅ Is it consistent across different endpoints?
- ✅ Are there generic holistic ways to paginate, sort, filter?
- ✅ Do the documented examples actually match the documented schema?
- ✅ Is the naming good?
- ✅ Are the IDs text (preferably UUIDs) and not numerical?
- ✅ Are there generic properties present across whole api like: last_modified_at, created_at? is it possible to sort by them?
- ✅ Are the dates in ISO format and do they include timezone information?
- ✅ Is there any versioning involved?
- ✅ Are there also errors being documented?
- ✅ Is there a “test mode” or “sandbox mode” (rare but usually very good sign)
- ✅ Are rate limits well documented?
- ✅ Does the product have a well reachable and prominent “For Developers” section?
- ✅ If webhooks are available too, are the webhook payloads consistent in structure with the API responses?

If the API checks more than half of these I think that’s a pretty good result.

Are these questions too technical? ChatGPT can help out — paste a couple of API documentation pages there and let it answer exactly these question and give you a generic API quality rating ⭐⭐⭐

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.