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Going API-First: Your First 30 Days

Transitioning to an API-first development strategy is hard work. Here’s what to expect in your first month.

Allen Helton
Better Programming
Published in
9 min readJul 6, 2022

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Photo by Katt Yukawa on Unsplash

For the past few years, I’ve been leading teams of serverless engineers to build some innovative new cloud products.

I thought I was the hip, forward-thinking manager by saying we were going to do API-first development. We ran with it for years but it wasn’t until I attended the Postman customer summit in May that I realized what I thought was API-first ……wasn’t. At all.

So I decided to make an adjustment. I opted to go all-in and actually build products API-first. Except there was a problem.

API-first is not only for development teams.

It is a complete mindset shift of what your product is. Is your product the UI or is it the API? This is a decision that veers way outside of a single engineering team.

But I am nothing if not persistent. I was (and still am) set on making a change. So I set out on a mission. I’m going to change how we build new applications.

At the time of this post, I’m about a month into the process. We’re going to talk about what went into that first 30 days and what to expect out of the next 30.

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Allen Helton
Allen Helton

Written by Allen Helton

I am an AWS serverless hero with a strong focus on API design and standardization, event-driven architectures, and software automation.

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