REST API Best Practices: Design, Errors, Rate Limits & Monitoring

REST is everywhere in tech – but “we have a REST API” doesn’t mean it’s easy to use, safe or scalable. In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Will, Seamus and Elliott break down the real-world best practices that turn yet-another-endpoint into an API your consumers (and SREs) actually love – from URL design and validation to rate limiting, async jobs and monitoring. In this episode, we explore: • What REST really means in practice – why it’s an architectural style not just CRUD, the role of statelessness, resource-oriented design, and how REST compares to SOAP, GraphQL and gRPC in real SEEK systems. • How to design APIs that are predictable and easy to use – covering plural resource names, clean URIs, versioning strategies, status codes that actually mean something, filtering/sorting/pagination, strong yet flexible validation, and OpenAPI-driven docs and SDKs. • The “grown-up” side of APIs: performance, safety and observability – why good monitoring and logs are non-negotiable, how to think about SLAs and error budgets, using rate limiting to protect your business and your users, and avoiding both under- and over-logging. Whether you’re a software engineer, SRE, architect, platform/DevOps engineer or IT manager, this episode gives you a concrete checklist (and plenty of war stories) for building REST APIs that are easier to consume, safer to operate and much kinder to your users’ networks and your own infrastructure. 🔔 Follow the SEEK Bytes podcast so you never miss a new episode