I had to chuckle when I read through this post titled When crafting your API strategy, put design first. It is very high-level and could/should apply to anything. Here are the main points:
Design for consistency
Design for scale
Design for people
Check. Yes to all of these. I suppose some folks need to be reminded of this. Especially the ‘sling code first and declare victory at some arbitrary point’ proponents. The ones with 60 hours of production downtime a month because design ‘just slows them down’. Apparently downtime doesn’t slow them down, but it sure slows down the consumers.
Another chuckle was this paragraph, which is nearly a direct quote from me (emphasis added):
Planning too little is dangerous. But so is planning too much. This isn’t a science experiment to find the ideal design. Perfection isn’t the goal: consistency is.