Foreword

Building an irresistible API doesn’t only make good business sense—it also makes developers happy and productive rather than grumpy and frustrated. I’m very happy to see Kirsten write this book, which explains how to build well-engineered APIs and explores what makes a developer actively want to use that API.

I’ll begin with a story. It’s September 2008, and Netflix is running a “hack day.” This is a day on which anyone at Netflix can build anything they want. It starts at noon one day and finishes at noon the next. You can work through the night if you need to. The Netflix API team was about to release the initial version of a public API for Netflix and had scheduled the hack day as a way to get extra testing time before the release. The Apple iPhone had been released earlier that year, and the first software developer toolkit for the iPhone had been released that summer. I was a manager at Netflix at that time, but I had started to build an iPhone app in my spare time and decided to build the first ever Netflix mobile app for the hack day.