E2 | A Conversation about APIs, Decoupling and Scalability | Matthew Foyle

In this episode, I chat with Matthew Foyle, a Senior Solutions Engineer at Algolia, which offers a Search API, all about APIs, decoupling your apps by using APIs and how to scale with REST and GraphQL.  We also touch upon the Contentful APIs and how they can be used for decoupling your front end from your back end. The following questions were asked: Tell us a bit about yourself. What caught your interest in the technical side of things? Tell us about Algolia. Can Algolia combine various content resources into one for indexing purposes? What is an API? What is JSON and why is it important? What is the JSON schema? Does GraphQL rely on.a schema? What did people do before APIs? What does decoupling mean? What is synchronous vs asynchronous? Can you provide an example of an async operation? What are some examples of async operations in Contentful? What does Headless and API-First in Contentful mean? Should we develop our apps with an API first mentality? What are some drawbacks to using APIs? Define REST and GraphQL.  What are they? What is HATEOAS? What are some drawbacks to using REST? Tell us what GraphQL is and how it works? Compare and contrast REST and GraphQL. What is introspection in GraphQL? What's the future for API consumption and development? If you use external APIs in your code, where does your intellectual property start and end? The following links were mentioned: GraphQL Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=783ccP__No8 Matthew’s Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/MatthewFoyle Algolia’s Website: https://www.algolia.com/ Contentful’s APIs: https://www.contentful.com/developers/docs/references/