Mastering REST API Design & Best Practices

<p>&quot;Design the backend for Twitter.&quot; Reciting HTTP verbs won&#39;t get you through that whiteboard session. In this deep dive we build a complete, staff-level blueprint for REST API design: the reasoning behind every rule, the trade-offs interviewers probe, and the patterns that keep large systems evolving safely.</p><p><br></p><p>You&#39;ll learn:</p><p>- Fielding&#39;s six REST constraints, and why statelessness unlocks horizontal scaling</p><p>- The Richardson Maturity Model, from the &quot;swamp of POX&quot; to HATEOAS</p><p>- URI design: stable identifiers, shallow nesting, filtering and sparse fieldsets</p><p>- Safety and idempotency, PUT vs PATCH, and JSON Merge Patch vs JSON Patch</p><p>- Status codes that show polish: 201 + Location, 409 Conflict, 410 Gone, 422</p><p>- Offset vs cursor pagination</p><p>- Versioning, breaking changes, tolerant readers and the expand-contract pattern</p><p>- Deprecation headers, RFC 7807 problem details and trace IDs</p><p>- OAuth 2.0, API keys, JWTs and mutual TLS</p><p>- Rate limiting: fixed window, sliding log, token bucket and leaky bucket</p><p>- ETags, Cache-Control, and 202 Accepted for long-running jobs</p><p>- OpenAPI and consumer-driven contract testing with Pact</p><p><br></p><p>Chapters</p><p>00:00 The whiteboard challenge</p><p>01:35 An API as a city</p><p>02:20 Fielding&#39;s six constraints</p><p>03:28 Code on demand</p><p>04:38 Statelessness and scaling</p><p>07:44 The layered system</p><p>09:21 The Richardson Maturity Model</p><p>12:29 HATEOAS and server-driven state</p><p>15:13 Pragmatic hypermedia</p><p>15:59 URI design rules</p><p>17:30 Stable identifiers</p><p>18:38 Nesting vs flattening</p><p>20:12 Query parameters</p><p>20:59 Safety and idempotency</p><p>22:54 PUT vs PATCH</p><p>25:39 JSON Merge Patch vs JSON Patch</p><p>27:39 201, 202 and 204</p><p>28:25 409 Conflict and optimistic locking</p><p>30:19 410 Gone</p><p>31:07 400 vs 422</p><p>31:54 Response envelopes</p><p>32:41 Offset pagination</p><p>34:39 Cursor pagination</p><p>36:11 API versioning</p><p>38:55 Breaking vs non-breaking changes</p><p>40:30 Tolerant readers</p><p>41:40 The expand-contract pattern</p><p>44:46 Deprecation and Sunset headers</p><p>45:52 RFC 7807 problem details</p><p>46:41 Trace IDs</p><p>47:27 Never leak internals</p><p>48:14 Returning all validation errors</p><p>49:24 OAuth 2.0 and API keys</p><p>51:25 JWTs and mutual TLS</p><p>52:57 Rate-limiting algorithms</p><p>56:29 429 and Retry-After</p><p>57:15 E