Talk With Your APIs, Not At Them

Reduce failed API requests by taking the time to “listen” to your API responses and — other pointers to improve your API conversation etiquette.

This Happens When You Don’t Speak Your API’s Language

Trudging across a deserted gravel-paved road and passing signs that screamed “Arret”, I stumbled over a barrier and found myself face-to-face with a pedestrian’s natural enemy: Traffic. As the off-key European horns blared and cars stopped inches from me, I found my footing, crossed successfully and found myself at my destination: An unobstructed field.

As I gazed across the horizon, thoughts swam through my head; I was grateful to be spending an extended period of time overseas, happy to be out of an increasingly claustrophobic apartment and, most importantly of all, I was pretty annoyed with a certain vendor’s API.

Like many of my most difficult tasks at work, the pipeline I was building was deceptively simple. It didn’t require a complex authentication process, it wasn’t returning a burdensome amount of data and, most importantly, it didn’t require a ton of parameters. All I needed to pass was a simple graphQL query specifying a date interval and some other information.

This should have taken me all of 1–2 hours. Except something with my request wasn’t working. Which is why I found myself pacing the Chessy, France, apartment muttering “Mon Dieu” as I defied every piece of problem solving advice and decided to go brute force, making small changes until I found the culprit.

Spoiler alert: I didn’t.

I realized that, like my attempts to converse with native French speakers, when it came to my requests to this particular API there was a language barrier. Though mon French is rather rusty, my API-speak is pretty proficient.

After such a frustrating experience I’ve taken a new approach to API-dependent ETL design. Instead of pretending the API is a nerd in an 80s movie and handing it a stack of “homework” to make sense of, I’m taking extra time to conversationally, not directly, communicate my request.

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