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.
Frontend Backend Integration Through APIs
Understanding how frontend components interact with backend APIs using HTTP requests (fetch, axios, etc.), handling asynchronous responses and errors, managing data flow from API responses to UI updates. Ability to design APIs that frontend needs and implement corresponding client-side code to consume them properly.
Data Management and Api Design
Designing how applications structure, expose, and consume data through APIs and backend systems. Covers API design principles for data endpoints, pagination, filtering and sorting, idempotency, versioning, rate limiting, schema design, normalization versus denormalization, consistency models, caching strategies, client side fetching patterns, and error handling. Includes considerations for data integrity across integrations, transactional boundaries, master data management, and how API decisions affect downstream consumers and performance.
Backend API Design for Frontend Consumption
Design APIs specifically considering frontend needs rather than just backend convenience. This includes: GraphQL vs. REST trade-offs, field-based vs. endpoint-based APIs, efficient data loading patterns (avoiding N+1 queries), pagination strategies, filtering and sorting, representing relationships between resources, versioning for frontend compatibility, and rate limiting. At Staff Level, understand how API design affects frontend development velocity: should you expose low-level APIs and let the frontend compose queries, or should you provide high-level endpoints tailored to specific UI needs? Understand BFF (Backend For Frontend) pattern and when it's valuable. Master concepts like query optimization and how to structure APIs to minimize network requests.
API Design and Frontend Integration
Design APIs that frontend applications can reliably consume. Cover resource modeling, HTTP method semantics, status codes and error payloads, response shape and field selection, pagination and filtering strategies, and approaches for minimizing bandwidth. Discuss versioning and backward compatibility, idempotency, authentication and authorization, rate limiting, and caching headers. Explain contract first design, documentation and contract testing, and tradeoffs between HTTP resource oriented designs and alternative approaches. Provide concrete endpoint examples and describe how to make API choices that simplify frontend integration and evolution.
Real Time Data and WebSocket Integration
Design and implement real time experiences that keep frontend state synchronized with backend changes. Topics include WebSocket and server sent event options, connection lifecycle and reconnection strategies with backoff and jitter, heartbeats and health checks, message ordering and idempotency, batching and backpressure management, optimistic UI updates and conflict resolution, authentication and security for persistent connections, and testing and observability for real time systems. Candidates should discuss trade offs between latency, reliability, complexity, and server cost.
API Design and Data Fetching Strategies
End to end design and client side integration of data APIs and fetching strategies. On the server side consider representational state transfer design principles, GraphQL schema and query trade offs, endpoint versioning, pagination approaches, batching, idempotency, and error semantics. On the client side cover pagination and incremental loading, request cancellation and abort semantics, debouncing and throttling, retry strategies and exponential backoff, optimistic updates, loading and error state management, and client side caching patterns such as stale while revalidate. Also include real time synchronization options such as WebSockets and server sent events, offline first synchronization and conflict resolution, service worker integration, and security considerations for authentication and authorization.