A practical checklist for shipping your first public API
Versioning, auth, pagination, and error shapes — the boring details that save weekends later.
Chidi Mensah
Public APIs fail quietly when contracts drift. Before you open the floodgates, lock down the basics.
Must-haves
- Stable URL prefixes and explicit versioning
- Consistent error envelopes
- Pagination metadata on every list
- Documented idempotency for writes
Nice-to-haves
OpenAPI generation from the source of truth, smoke tests against staging, and a changelog your clients can subscribe to.
By the writer
Chidi Mensah
Writes about cloud infrastructure, security, and open source.
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