api

Yesterday I described AI-generated code as “plausible-looking, locally coherent, globally wrong.” Here’s a concrete example from my own codebase.

I’ve written and talked extensively about Hypermedia APIs for about a decade. The HATEOAS constraints in representing resources for a RESTful API has numerous advantages in API ...

Let’s get Claude Code to connect to Google Sheets. We’ll use this Google Sample Spreadsheet.

I’ve previously written about the OpenSearch OpenAPI Specification.

I’ve been working on the new OpenSearch OpenAPI Specification that aims to properly document OpenSearch RESTful APIs. The spec is to be used to auto-generate OpenSearch clients ...

In 2020 Slack introduced granular permissions and has begun enforcing that legacy applications use them. I’ve previously migrated a simple bot to use those in-place, but it has ...

OpenSearch clients implement various high-level REST DSLs to invoke OpenSearch APIs. Efforts such as opensearch-clients#19 aim at generating these from spec in order to always b...

Amazon OpenSearch and Amazon OpenSearch Serverless use AWS SigV4 for authentication. We’ve made it dead easy to make authenticated requests across all OpenSearch clients in open...

On July 17, 2018, I spoke at the Christies first ever annual Tech Summit entitled “Exploring Blockchain”, in London. I even got a freebie NFT!

Slack recently introduced granular permissions and is now requiring all new apps to use those. The old apps are called classic apps, and new apps are called … apps. Slack also p...

I recently needed to stand up a demo app that invoked an AWS AppSync GraphQL API. The existing endpoint (not available publicly) returned restaurant data for a given zip with th...

I have been writing Ruby clients for various services for a few years now using the same pattern described in Writing a New Strava API Ruby Client. That itself was built on the ...

I recently helped debug Grape#1880, an issue a developer had with HTTP headers in Grape and Rack. It wasn’t immediately obvious.

Strava Webhook Events API seems to give developers trouble. Last year I wrote a new Strava Ruby client that made things significantly easier and came with some handy tools.

In June 2018 users started reporting slack-side disconnects in their Ruby bots, reported via slack-ruby-client#208, regardless of the concurrency library (Eventmachine or Cellul...

Despite an existing Swagger-compatible API, most of Strava interactions written in Ruby don’t use any auto-generated code and prefer strava-api-v3 (update: this gem was yanked i...

Strava has recently announced changes to the Strava OAuth flow. On October 15, 2019 all applications using the old flow will stop working.

There’s a bunch of financial market APIs out there, and after having tried a few for slack-market I still ended up using Yahoo Finance, undocumented, but wildly popular, “API”. ...

In a previous post I walked you through building and consuming a GraphQL API in Ruby. That was the happy path. In this post we’ll generate and handle some errors.

In the past few weeks I’ve convinced myself that GraphQL can work well for any micro-service. This post is a full walk-through of getting a working GraphQL API on Ruby on Rails....

I took a deep breath, and released Grape Framework 1.0. We’re at 8,066 Github stars and 965 forks. I still think Grape is the best way to build Ruby RESTful APIs. I’ve written m...

I gave a talk entitled “Your First Slack Bot Service” at the inaugural New York City Slack Meetup.

Slack bot experimentation, especially for not-too-serious purposes, has become a little too expensive on Heroku. There’s no free tier for maintaining apps running 24/7, so the d...

Like many, I found it easy to immediately criticize the Slack Web and RealTime API design. I would have wanted a RESTful implementation and not an RPC one. I would have liked fo...

One of the things you have to be aware when writing a bot is disabled integrations and closed connections. The first case is simple - when someone disables a bot integration, Sl...

I’ve extracted and improved upon common code from slack-gamebot and slack-mathbot and made slack-ruby-bot. It’s probably the easiest way to make a Slack bot in Ruby today.

I’ve been recently contributing to slack-pongbot, a node.js Slack bot for setting up ping-pong matches at Artsy.

Slides from my talk last night @ API Craft NYC: https://www.slideshare.net/dblockdotorg/designing-a-hypermedia-api-with-grape-roar.

I’ve begun experimenting with Hypermedia APIs a bit more seriously, trying to come up with a good infrastructure for the next version of the Artsy API. It might even be a public...

Got a chance to play with Goliath for a bit. You don’t need to do much work to mount Grape behind it. Grape figures out content-negotiation and formatting for you, so just strea...

I’ve seen two common API versioning strategies in the wild. The first is to use a single API version and gradually deprecate methods. This usually means introducing new API rout...

There are a number of excellent micro-frameworks to author RESTful APIs in Ruby. Let’s take a look at the newcomer, Poncho, from the Stripe team, brought up on the Grape mailing...

I’m very excited to Release Grape 0.4.0 today. Again, thanks to the 10 (!) contributors to this release.

If you’re not using NewRelic, here’s a pretty picture to convince you to try it out. And a blog post on measuring performance in Grape APIs with NewRelic RPM on the Art.sy Engin...

Grape’s after blocks don’t allow you to modify response text or status code [#200]. So how can you wrap an API response?

After almost a year of active development with 200+ commits, Grape 0.2.0 has finally been released. It’s the code from the “frontier” branch that we’ve been using in production ...

Expanding from my previous post on a Grape API mounted on RACK.

tl;dr – the source is here

One of my favorite talks at QCon 2011 was about Webmachine. I was very curious to see what those well-disciplined Erlang people had come up with. At the end of the talk I had le...

Building a software platform is not just an investment in the future, it’s a software architecture philosophy. A proper API is a manifestation of some of the core principles of ...

There’s got to be a prettier way of implementing this.

Sometimes you want to support both GET and POST in a Grape API.

A recent post “Rails is Not Your Application” caught my attention. It was fundamentally right, but the suggested implementation was misguided.

We’re using Grape in our Rails app on Heroku, which comes with New Relic instrumentation out-of-the-box. Let’s get the Grape API route details to show in New Relic as well.

Ran into a series of weird bugs with IE9. Turned out that a lot of our API requests were cached on the client. I am not sure whether this is some clever plot to make things work...

Oh, I know how much you want this!

We made some progress with modularizing our Grape API in the last post. But we only had one version and declared Api_v1 as our main API entry. Unless you’re Netflix and need an ...

A lot of people ask me whether we use Rails controllers for our API. We don’t, we use Grape. Grape is a Rack-based system and a DSL that provides a cleaner separation, some API-...

Now that we have dealt with exceptions in our API we need to provide various methods of authentication. We’re going to be talking grape and devise.

We’ve been using Grape to provide a RESTful API. Grape is a micro-framework for Ruby that makes it really easy.

I had a nice time today wrapping up the Idee PixMatch API in a Ruby gem. PixMatch is a general image matching engine that allows you to perform large scale image comparisons and...

I found this quite unusual. I needed to receive an array with some nested hashes part of a query string into a JSON API. Passing encoded JSON wasn’t looking hot. Turns out, in R...

I’ve been wanting to implement a POST protocol for my blog for a while. The urge got really bad since I’ve started using LiveWriter at my day job. It’s such a nice piece of soft...