Jeremiah Lee @jeremiahlee@librem.one

“But a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.” —Patrick Geddes

I remember the night I visited San Francisco months before I lived there and left a voicemail for Arthur: “I feel like I’ve reached a magical intersection of time and space where I can resonate.”

I love that I get to legitimately say, “Of course I’m precisely on time. I’m a Swede,” now.

@kevinswiber @danciruli Twilio is an interesting one. It was the company that introduced me to telephony-via-API. Did it have equally technically capable competitors back then?

@kevinswiber @danciruli As a former Stripe, I agree Stripe's DX helps it win sometimes, but I think DX is insufficiently advantageous even for it. Stripe today loses to competitors with worse DX often on cost, response time, US-based, lack of merchant-of-record capability.

PayPal has worse DX, but 2x Stripe's marketshare.

I think Stripe's initial primary benefit over Authorize.net was more not having to do a months-long process of establishing 3 vendor relationships than its DX.

@darrel_miller That's interesting for the client-side aspect of API management! Thanks for sharing.

I think Mark was referring more to organizations managing access, usage, internal cost-attribution of the external API vendors used by internal teams.

@geewee @civicunrest Adding a boolean flag to an API design is just taunting fate to make you regret it in the near future.

@kevinswiber @danciruli Can you share an example of 2 equally-capable API providers where one was more commercially successful because it had a better DX?

I can’t think of one. All the comparisons I could make were more differentiated by capability, price, or *–ilities.

“APIs are as much about hiding complexity as they are about exposing capability.” —Mehdi Medjaoui

“The public doesn’t understand their city’s complexity and they don’t care about it. Similarly, users don’t care about your system’s complexity. They’re not internal to your organization. It’s not their job.” —@civicunrest

#APIDaysParis #APIs #DX

#FollowFriday

@seldo one of the best tweeters (and friend) ever

@civicunrest for civic tech stuff

@Techmeme my favorite tech news curator

@hn500 orange site tech news curation without having to visit the orange site

@danciruli Sure, I agree.

My point is DX is not meaningful in the vast majority of enterprise vendor selections. It’s a “nice to have” because CTOs don’t make many vendor choices / engineering happiness is less important than the perceived business benefit of the purchase.

Salesforce? Zoura? Most Oracle products? Absolutely awful DX but it doesn’t matter. They still get purchased for $$$/year.

#APIDaysParis

#APIDaysParis @civicunrest on APIs transforming govt:

• City govts all do similar things, but tools/practices vary greatly for no good reason. They reinvent because there hasn’t been a better way.
• Most govt APIs so far focused on exposing data, not capabilities
• Legislation, internal needs and policies, and product innovation (competing with private sector) are changing this!
• Early progress in cooperatively built/maintained software, investment in open source components, and data standards

Quotes from Erik Wilde’s talk at #APIDaysParis

“Nobody wants APIs. They want to get stuff done. Everyone needs APIs, but APIs are not the important thing. The important thing is the capability we wrap in the API.”

“If you wrap something super duper useful in a badly designed API, people will still use it! They won’t be happy, but they’ll still use it.”

Erik reached same conclusion I did about developer experience. #DX is important, but does not matter as much as API providers want to believe.

If you have a productive, hacking cough do 👏 not 👏 attend 👏 a conference in-person. You are a biohazard. JFC… Did the pandemic not teach y’all anything‽

#APIDaysParis