James Higginbotham is a software developer and architect with over 25 years of experience in developing and deploying apps and APIs. He guides enterprises through their digital transformation journey, ensuring alignment between business and technology through product-based thinking to deliver a great customer experience. James engages with teams and organizations to help them align their business, product, and technology strategies into a more composable and modular enterprise platform. James also delivers workshops that help cross-functional teams to apply an API design-first approach using his ADDR process. His industry experience includes banking, commercial insurance, hospitality, travel, and the airline industry where he helped to get an airline off the ground--literally. You can learn more about his latest efforts at https://launchany.com and on Twitter @launchany.
I've had the good fortune to work alongside and learn from James over the past several years. His varied institutional knowledge, along with his depth of experience and eye for practical application, makes him unique among his peers. I am ecstatic that others now have the opportunity, in this book, to benefit from James's compelling, pragmatic vision for how to make better APIs. Principles of Web API Design surveys the gamut of available techniques and sets forth a prescriptive, easy-to-follow approach. Teams that apply the guidance in this book will create APIs that better resonate with customers, deliver more business value in less time, and require fewer breaking changes. I cannot recommend Principles of Web API Design enough. --Matthew Reinbold, Director of API Ecosystems, Postman In modern software development, APIs end up being both the cause of and solution to many of the problems we face. James's process for dissecting, analyzing, and designing APIs from concepts to caching creates a repeatable approach for teams to solve more problems than they create. --D. Keith Casey, Jr., API Problem Solver, CaseySoftware, LLC Following James's clear and easy-to-follow guide, in one afternoon I was able to apply his process to current real-world use cases. I now have the practical guidance, techniques, and clear examples to help me take those next vital steps. Recommended reading for anyone connected to and working with APIs. --Joyce Stack, Architect, Elsevier Principles of Web API Design uncovers more than principles. In it, you'll learn a process--a method to design APIs. --Arnaud Lauret, API Handyman This insightful playbook guides API teams through a structured process that fosters productive collaboration, valuable capability identification, and best-practice contract crafting. James distills years of experience into a pragmatic roadmap for defining and refining API products, and also provides a primer for API security, eventing, resiliency, and microservices alignment. A must-read for architects either new to the API discipline or responsible for onboarding new teams and instituting a structured API definition process. --Chris Haddad, Chief Architect, Karux LLC