APIs, Networking & Integration Topics
API design, management, and integration patterns including REST, GraphQL, and other protocols. Covers API contract design, versioning strategies, error handling, idempotency, deprecation planning, and SDK/integration frameworks. Includes system-to-system integration, webhook patterns, and integration platform considerations. Excludes network infrastructure and network-layer protocols (see Network Architecture under Cloud & Infrastructure or a dedicated networking category if needed).
Application Programming Interface Design and Integration
Designing Application Programming Interfaces and selecting communication protocols to meet functional and non functional requirements. Candidates should be able to evaluate and choose between Representational State Transfer style resource oriented interfaces, Graph Query Language approaches, remote procedure call frameworks such as Google Remote Procedure Call, and message based or event driven integration patterns. Discussion should cover protocol and format trade offs including latency, throughput, consistency and ordering, binary versus text serialization formats such as protocol buffers or JavaScript Object Notation, developer ergonomics, client diversity, and resource consumption. Core design topics include contract design and schema evolution, versioning and backward compatibility strategies, pagination, filtering, sorting and error handling conventions, authentication and authorization models, rate limiting and quota strategies, caching choices, and gateway or proxy patterns. Integration concerns include direct synchronous calls, asynchronous message based decoupling, event streaming, and web hooks, plus client and server software development kits and data transformation between layers. Candidates should also explain resilience and reliability patterns such as timeouts, retries, circuit breaker and bulkhead techniques, and describe testing, monitoring and observability approaches including logging, metrics and distributed tracing. Finally, discussion should connect API and protocol choices to coupling, scalability, operational complexity, security posture, and developer productivity.
API Integration and System Connectivity
Covers the end to end concepts and practices for connecting systems using application programming interfaces and integration middleware. Candidates should understand REST and HTTP fundamentals, webhooks versus polling, API authentication and authorization patterns, request and response formats, rate limiting, versioning, and reading API documentation. Include practical skills for building and troubleshooting integrations: data mapping and transformation, schema mapping, message formats, error handling and retry strategies, idempotency, logging and monitoring, and ensuring data consistency across synchronous and asynchronous flows. Also includes integration tooling and middleware platforms, real time versus batch synchronization, designing for partial failures and back pressure, and frontend concerns such as async data fetching, loading and error states, pagination, optimistic updates, and race condition mitigation.