api-design-principles

REST API design uses resource-oriented modeling with proper HTTP methods, status codes, and consistent naming conventions. This skill teaches core principles like correct verb semantics, stateless interactions, and HATEOAS patterns to ensure your endpoints are intuitive and maintainable across platforms.

API versioning strategies manage breaking changes while maintaining backward compatibility. This skill covers approaches like URL versioning, header-based versioning, and deprecation policies so you can evolve your API gracefully without disrupting existing clients.

Pagination and filtering patterns let clients retrieve large datasets efficiently. This skill provides proven designs for limit/offset and cursor-based pagination, filter syntax, and query parameter conventions that scale across REST and GraphQL implementations.

GraphQL and REST serve different needs: GraphQL excels at flexible client queries and reduces over-fetching, while REST is simpler for resource-centric APIs. This skill teaches both paradigms, their schema design patterns, and resolvers so you choose the right fit for your use case.

Consistent error handling improves developer experience through predictable response formats, meaningful error codes, and clear messages. This skill covers error response structures, HTTP status code selection, and documentation practices for both REST and GraphQL.

API security encompasses authentication, authorization, rate limiting, input validation, and HTTPS enforcement. This skill integrates security into the design phase, ensuring your resource models, endpoints, and documentation include security requirements from the start.