Pleasing Developers

Just read an article by Alex Handy on the cover of the June 1, 2010 SD Times "For APIs, pleasing developers is key to successful evolution". Sounds like, well, duh, but the article still has some good whys. Some takeaways: a) APIs are important and have to be maintained, b) developers want straight forward calls (REST), c) developers want stable APIs so their apps don't break, d) developer favor working code examples over documentation. Nothing radical there.

But it got me to thinking. There is a separation of concerns here. The folks producing web APIs typically have data that they are experts on. They want people to use their data, but the data experts can't be experts on all possible user communities. That's where the API comes in to separate the concerns. The data owner provides an data centric API and the developers who know individual user communities make the data useful to that community. No wonder it's such a powerful model.

Good article on the importance of people over process.
Characterizing people as non-linear, first-order components in software development