12-24-2025, 10:50 AM
I'm leading the backend development for a new internal platform at my company, and we're in the early stages of designing the REST API that multiple frontend and mobile teams will consume. While I understand the basic principles, I'm grappling with several design decisions around versioning strategies, granularity of endpoints, and the best practices for handling complex nested resources without creating a convoluted or inefficient structure. For experienced API architects, what are the most critical but often overlooked aspects of REST API design that impact long-term maintainability and developer experience? How do you approach trade-offs between creating many specific endpoints versus fewer, more flexible ones with complex query parameters, and what is your preferred method for communicating API changes and deprecations to client teams?