apidays LIVE Australia - Building Business Ecosystems Supporting a versioned API Andrew McCauley, Developer Success Lead at Shopify

1. The Path To API
Versioning

2. Andrew McCauley
Developer Success Lead

3. Oliver
Louie
Jinx

4. - Aubrey Graham
“Started from the bottom now we
here.”

5. Make commerce better
for everyone.

6. 1M+ 175Merchants Countries

7. 4600+Apps in the app store
6Apps installed on the average
merchant’s store

8. 2017

9. Multi-Location Inventory

10. • T-shirt
• Small, Red
• Medium, Red
• Large, Red
• Small, Blue
• Medium, Blue
• Large, Blue
• etc.

11. • /admin/variants/#{variant_id}.json
{
"variant": {
"id": 808950810,
"product_id": 632910392,
"title": "Pink",
"price": "199.00",
"sku": "IPOD2008PINK",
...
"inventory_quantity": 10,
"old_inventory_quantity": 10,
...
}
}
Inventory -
One Location

12. • Locations API - /admin/locations.json
• Inventory Item API - /admin/inventory_items.json
• Inventory Level API - /admin/inventory_levels.json
Inventory -
Multiple Locations

14. The Migration

15. More Merchants
More
Partners
More
GMV

16. Yolo ship it. 🚢

17. Communication
Overload

18. Decoupling

21. 🔋 🔋 🔋 🔋

22. Stability and
Predictability
vs.
Shipping and
Progress

24. It’s a version! 👶🍼
2019-04

25. • Quarterly releases on the first of January, April, July, and October
• Naming: yyyy-mm
• shop.myshopify.com/admin/api/2020-04/products.json
• Versions supported for 12 months before being removed
• 9 months to migrate when a breaking change is introduced
Versioning at Shopify

27. A versioning strategy is
not enough.

28. Hear and be heard

32. “Actually, shout out to all those who made that API Health
Dashboard - it’s a lifesaver, and adds a huge deal to our
Shopify App Developer happiness. It’s as watching all your
tests go green, but 1000 times more satisfactory, because
it’s an external authority validation! ✅ ”

33. Deprecation Header

34. Transparency goes
both ways

35. Make commerce better
for everyone.

36. 💖 Developers

37. Thanks!