Your Guide to API Design Patterns

A number of articles in API Design Patterns discuss common design patterns for APIs… that is, API Design Patterns. This page is an index of thos articles.

I See Patterns

Humans are great at recognizing patterns. In software, software design patterns gained popularity in the 1990’s as a way of capturing design constraints and reusable solutions to recurring problems, accompanied by a “pattern language” to describe them. (Fielding’s dissertation even cites Christopher Alexander’s thinking on pattern languages.)

Published: May 8, 2024

!Oh CRUD!

or, Being Resourceful in REStful API Design

Published: June 17, 2024

API Naming Patterns

Patterns for naming things in APIs

Published: July 15, 2024

Validating API Requests

Techniques for API Request Validation

Published: August 19, 2024

Leave a Calling Card

Make API responses more self-descriptive with reference objects

Published: September 19, 2024

API Design Antipattern: Leaky Abstractions

Pro tip: Do not let internal implementation constraints leak into your API

Published: June 3, 2025

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