bgeek.net

I didn’t recognise you it’s been so long.

I finally got the urge and the patience to fire up my editor and write a post for this long neglected weblog.

How are you all doing? good I hope?

Ok so I may have been prompted to write by a link from Julian over at ProWorkflow but I’m here now and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?

But what to write about? That’s one reason I’ve not posted an update for so long, I’ve been keeping my head down getting as much done at Xero as possible, and not really coming up for air.

So a couple of posts that I’ve been meaning to write and never got around to:0

• Email and the myth of standards (or how I created a chain of 3000 emails in an hour),
• How to keep your eye on the goal and not be distracted by the shiny fruit of extra features
• Why estimation is sooo hard
• Why estimates are so useful

For now I’m going to be terse and keep things concise.

Open Question: What makes a good API?

So you’ve got a product that loads of people could potentially tap into the use of if only there was a clear and concise way of tying in their existing product line into yours. So you need an API, but an API is useless unless people actually use it.

At the moment Xero has a functional and useful API that’s available to our many Network partners , we love the idea that people can do many of the great features that we can’t get round to right now (and I’m not sure we’d want to). Easy accounting is our goal and allowing you to use the solution for Payroll or Project management that suits you and get as much generated in Xero as possible really suits us down to the ground.

But an API is only as good as the tools that use it, and we rely on development effort to get the external products working well with Xero, we’ve tried to make the API as clean as possible, but we really need feedback.

What do you want from an API? What makes an API easy to use for you?

Interested in feedback.

This is not a Xero mandated survey, I’m just interested in what people think about API's and what makes them good.