12-24-2025, 04:44 PM
I'm designing a new REST API for our internal inventory management system, and I'm trying to establish clear best practices for our team regarding versioning, error handling, and pagination before we start building client applications. I'm leaning towards a versioning strategy in the URL path and using standard HTTP status codes, but I'm unsure about the best way to structure detailed error responses or implement efficient cursor-based pagination for large datasets. For API developers who have maintained a long-lived REST API, what are the most important design decisions you made early on that paid off in terms of maintainability and developer experience, and what common pitfalls should I avoid to prevent breaking changes for our internal clients down the road?