In February 2026, Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, told Lex Fridman that the best tool for agentic AI has been on their desktop for 50 years. According to him, the simple command line interface (CLI) is the ideal tool for working with today’s non-deterministic technologies. The modular architecture of AI, LLMs, and agents require ...
#api design
20 posts
13 May
16 Apr
“Web APIs today are broken.” A bold statement made by Microsoft’s Darrel Miller during his talk at the November 2025 A2ASummit. It’s a sentiment shared by many industry leaders. The interfaces that we see as the glue holding the digital world together have become too brittle to support modern applications, especially those powered by AI. ...
7 Apr
In 2020, software engineer Ivan Velichko published an article titled “API Developers Never REST,” detailing the rise of alternate design strategies that have emerged since Roy Fielding published his dissertation in 2000. Yes, the title is a jokey hook designed to snag eyeballs and attention, but like all good humor, there’s a kernel of truth ...
3 Mar
In years gone by, API specifications and developer portals were created for developers’ eyes only. It wasn’t unusual for them to include the occasional joke or pop culture reference, or omit context that any qualified API consumer would easily be able to infer. While the introduction of standards like OpenAPI has already systematized and sanitized ...
5 Feb
Building API-first is an incredibly powerful strategy — it brings a ton of value to organizations seeking to make their data and APIs more consumable, more useful, and more valuable. Interestingly, however, it seems like API-first has another huge benefit: AI-first. So what does it mean to be API-first, and what benefits does this carry ...
21 Jan
When it comes to building tech initiatives, we often say that they should be treated as products in order for them to succeed. Treating your internal APIs as a product means that you’re not just thinking about the utilitarian nature of your systems — you’re thinking about internal users as consumers, and thereby prioritizing the ...
7 Jan
In OpenAPI, the industry standard API specification, small steps can have major implications. While OpenAPI 3.2.0 may not reinvent the wheel, as it still follows the same architecture and uses the JSON Schema Specification Draft 2020-12 implemented in OpenAPI 3.1.0, OpenAPI Specification v3.2.0 still has enough changes to warrant excitement while remaining compatible with older ...
30 Dec 2025
In the interconnected digital landscape, software applications communicate through layers of application programming interfaces (APIs). For architects responsible for steering large, complex systems, the move to an API-first strategy is no longer optional — it’s the bedrock for delivering resilient, scalable, and innovative digital experiences. This approach ensures that APIs are treated as first-class citizens, ...
24 Dec 2025
For as long as most of us can remember, “developer experience” has been the umbrella term when it comes to measuring the usability, reliability, and effectiveness of APIs. A great developer experience, meaning one that makes things straightforward and reduces friction as much as possible, is the gold standard. Get your DX right, and word ...
10 Dec 2025
Choosing the right architectural style isn’t just a technical detail — it’s critical to the success of your API and every application that relies on it. The architecture determines how easily developers can understand and integrate your API, profoundly impacting their experience. It dictates how clients and servers communicate, directly affecting application efficiency, performance, and ...
4 Dec 2025
Technology is only as useful as it is usable. Users will only discover a product’s innovative features if it’s designed well enough for a user to first find and then use them. This is just as true with agentic AI as anything else — even if the agent’s doing a good portion of the work. ...
22 Oct 2025
AI agents are increasingly autonomous in the way they interact with APIs and the systems those APIs represent. But unlike human developers, who can intuit solutions pretty readily, agents aren’t quite up to the task of reading docs, joining Slack channels, or pinging support when something breaks. They rely entirely on metadata, structure, and observed ...
6 Sept 2022
For new users working with jOOQ for the first time, the number of types in the jOOQ API can be overwhelming. The SQL language doesn’t have many such “visible” types, although if you think about SQL the way jOOQ does, then they’re there just the same, but hidden from users via an English style syntax. … Continue reading A Brief…
20 Aug 2021
jOOQ has been around for a while – since around 2009 as a publicly available library, and since 2013 as a commercially licensed product. A lot of things have happened in 12 years. Here are 10 things that you maybe didn’t know about jOOQ. 1. eq, ne, gt, ge, lt, le are inspired by XSLT … Continue reading 10 Things…
6 Jun 2019
How to write a simple API is already an art on its own. I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. ― Mark Twain But keeping an API simple for beginners and most users, and making it extensible for power users seems even more of a challenge. … Continue reading How to…
11 Feb 2016
Some APIs are set in stone. For instance, the JDK’s. Or public APIs, like the one between a database and a database client (e.g. JDBC). This makes designing such APIs rather difficult as a lot of thinking needs to be done prior to publishing an API. Which means that being defensive when designing the API … Continue reading Dear API…
5 Jan 2016
jOOQ is an internal domain-specific language (DSL), modelling the SQL language (external DSL) in Java (the host language). The main mechanism of the jOOQ API is described in this popular article: The Java Fluent API Designer Crash Course. Anyone can implement an internal DSL in Java (or in most other host languages) according to the … Continue reading A Curious…
9 Mar 2015
Yak Shaving (uncountable): (idiomatic) Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem. (idiomatic) A less useful activity done to consciously or unconsciously procrastinate about a larger but more useful task. Both interpretations of the term Yak Shaving as explained by Wiktionary are absolutely accurate … Continue reading Yak Shaving…
29 Jan 2015
Writing good APIs is hard. Extremely hard. You have to think of an incredible amount of things if you want your users to love your API. You have to find the right balance between: Usefulness Usability Backward compatibility Forward compatibility We’ve blogged about this topic before, in our article: How to Design a Good, Regular … Continue reading You Will…
15 Sept 2014
Pun intended… Let’s discuss Java final. Recently, our popular blog post “10 Subtle Best Practices when Coding Java” had a significant revival and a new set of comments as it was summarised and linked from JavaWorld. In particular, the JavaWorld editors challenged our opinion about the Java keyword “final“: More controversially, Eder takes on the … Continue reading This is…