For the REST of us: API First and Conway’s Law

Imagine building a bridge between five independent islands. That was the challenge we faced when creating a uniform and cohesive REST API in our organization with distributed R&D offices, developing a setup of five server applications, each with its own history, architecture and development team, which invokes Conway’s Law.

REST(ful) APIs have existed for more than two decades. This talk is not about the latest API frameworks; it is about the people and organizations required to make them work at scale. We will share our experiences navigating the organizational complexities of aligning individual systems, demonstrating that API design is often 80 percent negotiation and 20 percent code. We will also show how we implemented this: a central repository on GitLab, sharing OpenAPI specifications and documentation for our organization: created by developers for developers.