API Design Best Practices for Internal and External Use
API Design Best Practices for Internal and External Use APIs connect teams and systems. Good design helps both internal engineers and external partners. A clear contract, stable behavior, and thoughtful security make your APIs trustworthy and easy to use. Design should rest on a handful of guiding principles that stay true as you grow and change. Consistent interfaces across resources and verbs. Explicit contracts that evolve safely through versioning and deprecation. Helpful error messages and predictable failure modes. Backward compatibility whenever you introduce changes. Internal versus external users have different priorities. Internal teams move fast and rely on strong typing, tooling, and quick iteration. External developers value a friendly onboarding, stable behavior, and clear limits on usage and rate. ...