How to Design a Good API

[thorfinn]

This is one of the best programming talks I have seen, ever.

If you do any software development, programming, or even scriptwriting, you need to watch the whole hour of this.

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw

ACM citation, including the great abstract: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1176622

Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3733345136856180693

Slides Scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/33655/How-to-Design-a-Good-API-and-Why-it-Matters

Slides PDF: http://lcsd05.cs.tamu.edu/slides/keynote.pdf

Alternate video, maybe: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/effective-api-design

Comments

[etfb.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I work for fascists. Can you post the direct link? Provided it's not YouTube, I may be able to access it then, but via LJ all embedding is verboten.

[thorfinn]

Unfortunately that link is youtube...

But maybe:
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/effective-api-design
http://www.scribd.com/doc/33655/How-to-Design-a-Good-API-and-Why-it-Matters
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1176622

[damien-wise.livejournal.com]

It's extremely interesting stuff and more programmers/designers/architects should know it, so thankyou for the heads-up.
Heh, I got about halfway through before my brain fuzzed-up and went "Enough!". This is partly a question of attention-span but more about optimal rate of info-absorption and spotting the signs of approaching a soft limit. That's why the pause-button is such a good invention. ;)

[thorfinn]

*nodnod* As a serious professional software architect/toolsmith/engineer, nothing in it is new to me... But it's all stuff I fought about and learned over several years of experience. It's really nice to see it laid out exactly the way I talk about it, pretty much.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Yeah? I got about ten minutes in and realised I didn't give a fuck anymore :)

[thorfinn]

Heh heh. :-)

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Apropos of which, I asked an aerial community I'm on to recommend me a coach in Seattle while I'm there, and someone recommended Versatile Arts, which is Beverly Sobelman. So I pinged her to book a couple of lessons while I'm there. We never actually met when she was in Melbourne, somehow.

[thorfinn]

Ace. :-) bevsob is her.

[travisjhall.livejournal.com]

Yes, I generally strike the same issue with lecture-form presentation of information, no matter what the information. I need a high density of information that I don't get from talks, and I do much better when I control the flow of information.

Like thorfinn, there's nothing there so far (at ten minutes in - I haven't had the time to listen to the rest yet, quite apart from issues of the medium) that I'm not familiar with. Possibly unlike thorfinn, though, my success in convincing colleagues of the importance of these ideas has generally been fairly limited. It's stuff I really wish more software developers understood.

[thorfinn]

Make them watch the lecture. :-) There's also a bunch of one sentence aphorisms in the abstract:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1176622

That may be more useful than the talk itself, potentially. It's all stuff that should be in every Coding Standard.

[travisjhall.livejournal.com]

I like that abstract a lot. It's almost a checklist for how to do it right.