Practicing Safe Sex with Third-Party APIs | Hacker News Reader

Practicing Safe Sex with Third-Party APIs

blog.smartbear.com

Lorinda Brandon's preso from the API Strategy conference last month. Be safe! :)

This is straight up using sex in an advertisement for a product SoapUI Pro by Smartbear. Slides 27, 28 and 29 are the only approaching anything that could be considered content and even calling them content would be generous.

Agreed, this is a really bad ad. I don't even know what SoapUI does for me and the slides didn't say anything but "APIs are dangerous, protect yourself!"

I had hoped that in place of the final advertisement slide would be a presentation full of advice and strategies on using 3rd party APIs defensibly. I'd have been happy to have a few ad slids at the end of /that/ information, but here the content was just replaced entirely by "use our product to solve this (and I won't even show you how)."

Lame.

Yeah, there is an advertisement at the end, which is unneeded, but for the most part I think the "safe sex" theme is just meant to add a bit of personality to her slides. That's not necessarily a bad thing to see in this kind of presentation.

"every one of us wonders if someone has written an API that can do what they’re asking for"

You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.

API: Application Programming Interface

API == the interface, not the service. You don't write an API to do something. You write an API as a way to access a service that does something.

At least have your marketing team use the terminology correctly, if that's what your product is all about.

The only thing to take with you is that you need automatic regression tests against 3rd party APIs. That way when they change their behaviour or goes down you are alerted straight away. Hopefully those test suites would be running against 3rd parties staging/development environment as well so you are alerted sooner about feature changes.

This is an absolutely terrible article/advertisement. While I understand the reason they used "safe sex", it wasn't required, AND there was no new knowledge to be gained. Nothing novel, no description of how to solve the issue of coding against an API that can disappear and how to solve that problem.

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