Simple APIs are not just easy to understand but are also easier to scale, more performant, and safer. By picking a specific use case, you focus on a single design and keep your API simple. As you try to do many things, it becomes complex and hard to understand. When you start designing an API, it’s tempting to try and solve too many problems at once. Over the years, we settled on some principles that guide our API design. By the end, you should have some ideas that you can take back to your own API process. In this post, we’ll describe our API design principles, as well as our process for how new APIs are specced, reviewed, and tested. But by recognizing those mistakes and identifying how to improve them - even sometimes doubling down on being consistent with a past choice we would not agree with in the present - we can improve the developer experience holistically.ĭeveloping your own API style guide can’t completely save you from making crummy decisions or preventing today’s enthusiastic choices becoming tomorrow’s regrets, but they will help you make decisions openly, honestly, and with clarity. We made mistakes, and the platform certainly could provide a friendlier developer experience. This is not to say that Slack has always designed APIs well.

Bad APIs become a liability for a company. Bad API design leads to a bare minimum adoption, and even frustration. We also value a developer’s time and the resource they risk by building on our platform. They will invest heavily, and sometimes even become evangelists for your APIs. If APIs are designed well, developers will love them, and can become the most creative innovators using your APIs. That’s why it’s important to carefully think about your API design from the very beginning.

While we can change the implementation of our features under the hood, removing or changing the behavioral contract for an existing API is very hard. Over the years, one thing we keep top of mind is designing for a great developer experience. Today, millions of users bring their work into Slack, and those apps built by over 885,000 active developers on the platform are key to further improving collaboration in Slack. More than five years ago, we launched the Slack Platform, giving developers an easy way to build apps in Slack and publish them in our App Directory.

Slack api documentation