API Development
APIs are essential for interacting with and building large-scale technology. They have quickly become central to enabling collaboration, innovation, and communication in the digital space.
The rise of Business Intelligence (BI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has further increased API importance, as these technologies heavily rely on APIs for data access and model deployment.
This might be why recent data show that almost 90% of developers use APIs in some form during their processes.
August 1, 2024 | 16 min read
API Development
How Blackbird let me focus on what was important
In today’s market, time is an extremely valuable commodity. I’d like to share my thoughts on the current ways to help make the most efficient use of developers’ time and effort. I’m a developer at heart and even though I am helping to build it, here’s what gets me excited about using Blackbird API Development Platform to develop Blackbird.
How I Build Projects
July 31, 2024 | 6 min read
API Mocking
I’ve been developing APIs for years. In every API project, I face the same struggle of needing mocks, but spending too much time setting up, hosting, and maintaining them. I’d rather spend that time implementing the APIs or client code. API Mocking is important — it’s useful in development, debugging, testing, and can power the “try-it-out” portion of an API’s docs.
As a software engineer I’ve used a variety of mocking tools and libraries including Mock Server, SOAP UI, and Mock Service Worker. These tools are helpful, and can be quick to setup for personal use, but still require a lot of infrastructure and setup to effectively use on a dev team or in CI/CD scenarios. Every software company I’ve worked at had a different home-grown way of configuring and hosting mocks for APIs, and usually the hosting part was managed by a separate DevOps or infra team.
Blackbird is a new tool I helped create at Ambassador that among other things can quickly create shareable mock instances of APIs and host them in a SaaS environment. This post will walk through an example of using Blackbird to setup mocking on an AI chatbot application that both consumes and implements an API.
July 31, 2024 | 8 min read
API Gateway
Community Corner with Cindy Mullins
July 31, 2024 | 9 min read
API Mocking
Research shows that nearly 90% of developers use APIs in some way. However, using live APIs during development can pose risks and slow down your workflow. That's where mocking becomes invaluable.
What is API Mocking?
API mocking simulates the behavior of real APIs, creating a controlled environment for testing and development.
July 30, 2024 | 13 min read
API Development
I'm pretty sure we all witnessed–if not lived through the disruption of–one very expensive bad code release and IT outage this summer. As someone who spent decades in software development, I can tell you with confidence that although the actual costs of that mistake were upwards of one billion dollars, the emotional toll on the developers involved was probably more. It was a lose-lose situation for all involved. I know developers are pushed harder than ever to code faster, release more often, and–" oh, by the way"–test their code. Meanwhile, infrastructures get more complex by the minute as regions, offices, networks, apps, services, machines, and containers multiply.
As a former developer, I understand the pain of building, testing, and deploying your own code (which, by the way, is even more complicated than ever in today's cloud-native, microservices-driven world). Now, as a CEO, I also understand the pain (or at least the very real fear of the pain) of a potential billion-dollar mistake. Regardless of whether you relate to either of those positions, on a less sensational note, I think we can all appreciate the role of healthy growth in a business's success today and the critical part that software plays.
Let’s take APIs, for example. A subset of all of the things that developers might be building, but - importantly - an increasingly vital necessity and one of the biggest drivers of volume, urgency, and security. Application Programming Interfaces; it’s an awful acronym, I’m sorry. Despite that, it's a heck of a powerful thing. These little pieces of code are the language that enables all of our devices and various applications to connect and share information. I'm certainly not the first to say it, but APIs are the essential building blocks of the modern world.
July 29, 2024 | 9 min read
