NetDNA sets the bar for startup- and developer-friendliness | Hacker News Reader

NetDNA sets the bar for startup- and developer-friendliness

blog.leftronic.com

47 pointsbtipling11 comments

This was a bad decision. Api change should never be made in 48 hours for a single customer. These are the kinds of decisions you are stuck with for years. Worse, if you ever want to get rid of it, you can't! Good Apis don't slide the carpet out under dev's feet.

Making knee-jerk, one-off decisions are a sure sign of bad things to come.

In normal cases this would be true.

You want to have a system in place that is adaptable and flexible for its end users, but strict enough so that it doesn"t break production or core systems. This is where agile development and quality assurance comes in.

I think in this case the requests made were already on the development roadmap, and were escalated with the request. It is not unrealistic for any high performance team to crank out these types of requests in 2 full days, and still maintain a solid API platform.

Plan, Do, Check, Act is aleays the best method for long term product quality assurance. Eventually all systems will have a need for some type of update that makes improvements or innovatations to its code base. Its how you deploy those changes which determines the updates success.

They've been really good to me also. I asked if it was possible to check the status of push-CDN content sync to edge servers via API. It wasn't possible, but the op said they'd forward the request to devs. A week later the call was implemented and available.

Is this a satire? There are an incredible number of exclamation points (!), the post is hosted on soon-to-be defunct Postereous and the OP seems surprised that developer evangelists/advocates exist and are helpful.

Carter, no it is not. I know Twilio has a great API and a number of integrations, this was one of our first 3rd party integrations on our new API. Why are you so upset?

Not upset at all, apologies if it came off that way. Just trying to ascertain the legitimacy of the post, thought I saw some red flags.

all good <3

I don't think so. More than likely, English is not the author's first language. As a one-time ESL teacher I noticed that students from other cultures often used exclamation points in place of where a native English speaker would have simply used italics. That is to say, they use exclamation points to indicate emphasis rather than excitement. But who knows, maybe the author just really is excited about their topic (!).

I have encountered quite a few APIs which are both poorly supported and not well thought out. There is a lot of emphasis placed on supporting the product but as a developer I want the API to also be a first class citizen in the support priority queue. Take a look at Salesforce APIs. The documentation is horrid, the APIs are not very good and sometimes even broken (like with Desk.com), and there is little to no support. Customers for a product get support, but what about developers who aren't customers but are essential for building out the platform for your product?

I want everyone to be like NetDNA when it comes to their API. For example they went and joined a hangout to help someone out with their API.

Any review that has 'Wow!' in it should be deleted before posting.

And 'Mind you, NetDNA is not a tiny little startup with a handful of customers - they have thousands of paying customers and they are promising to turn around a new API feature in less than two days!' doesn't cause any alarm bells to go off? What "giant company" can turn around two new API solutions and test/deploy in 2 days? None, not even Microsoft. There should be wayyy too much red tape for such a thing to ever happen.

@dubcanada we are not a giant company or a tiny startup. We have great engineers who move fast and meet tight deadlines. Believe me, our customers and partners appreciate it.

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