API Development at Sift Science

Micah WyldeOctober 21, 2014

At Sift Science, APIs are incredibly important. We spend a lot of time improving upon our existing APIs and thinking about how to design even better ones. A couple of weeks ago at the San Francisco API Craft Meetup, I gave a talk on how we built the API that powers our new Sift console.

At its inception, the Sift console was an internal Rails app built for investigating model issues. As we made the console accessible to our users, we rewrote it as a single-page JavaScript app driven by a set of private, undocumented APIs. For the third iteration of our console, we took an API-driven approach. The new APIs that drive the console are powerful and comprehensive enough to allow our users to build their own interfaces atop their data. The console is just another consumer of these underlying APIs.

Some of the technologies we utilized to build it include:

In my talk, I discussed how we migrated our API and console, as well as some of the lessons we learned along the way.

If you missed the talk, you can check it out below! Questions about Sift? Feel free to drop us a line any time.

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