Practical writing for platform and API teams. Rate limiting algorithms, OAuth vs. API-key tradeoffs, keeping reference docs in sync with the gateway, and the operational details of running API infrastructure that partners depend on.
Latency percentiles, error budgets, key-level traffic attribution, quota headroom, and downstream dependency health — why these five signals predict partner escalations before they happen.
The integration bottleneck is almost never the API itself — it's the gap between the gateway config and the docs the partner reads. How co-located gateway + reference docs collapses that gap.
Header versioning, URL versioning, and content negotiation all have tradeoffs. Here's the decision matrix we give platform teams and why sunset timelines matter more than the version scheme itself.
Spec-generated docs always need post-processing: missing examples, incorrect response codes, and prose that reads like a YAML file. A walkthrough of the gaps and how to fill them without abandoning the spec.
Most platform teams reach for OAuth by default. Here's when a simpler API-key model reduces partner onboarding friction without sacrificing the security guarantees that matter.
A practical comparison of three rate-limiting algorithms — when each degrades gracefully under burst traffic and what the implementation cost looks like at the gateway layer.