API Development
Every time you browse a website, interact with an app, or even sign up for a newsletter, you're engaging with a network of APIs behind the scenes. These invisible champions fetch the content you see, deliver images, and enable every click and submission. APIs are the unsung heroes of the digital world, making our online experiences seamless and efficient.
Given their critical role, ensuring APIs function flawlessly is essential. A single API failure can disrupt content delivery, render tools useless, and leave web pages hanging or empty. The ripple effects are significant—dissatisfied customers, lost revenue, tarnished reputations, and even legal troubles if the failure results in data loss or security breaches.
On the other hand, API testing is not a quick or painless undertaking. The process is particularly thorny in microservices environments, which dominate modern businesses today. As companies look to their developers to release APIs in higher quantities and quality than ever, a routine approach to API testing is more important than ever. The “Wild West” of API development is no longer a viable option.
August 8, 2024 | 19 min read
Edge Stack API Gateway
APIs have become an important aspect in modern software development, these APIs are the backbone of modern applications, facilitating seamless interactions between different software systems. By monitoring API performance and key metrics, developers can preemptively identify and address potential issues, thereby maintaining a robust user experience and adhering to strict service level agreements (SLAs). API Monitoring stands as a pivotal element in ensuring the health and performance of application programming interfaces.
This comprehensive guide will dig into the intricacies of API monitoring, covering essential metrics, tools, and best practices to help you keep your APIs in top shape.
What is API Monitoring?
August 6, 2024 | 13 min read
API Development
Need a publicly accessible reverse proxy? Want to skip testing with localhost? Blackbird has an easy solution.
Setting up the Proxy
August 2, 2024 | 1 min read
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 Development
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