Courses, guides and demos
Plain-English courses and guides I've written for product people, and live demos you can click around in to see APIs, GraphQL and webhooks working for real.
Showing 7 items
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Short series that build up one idea at a time, with diagrams and a live example running through them.
Six plain-English parts on how APIs work, built around a live weather page: requests and responses, JSON, keys and limits, and how to read real API docs.
Three plain-English parts on GraphQL: what it is, how queries, mutations and errors work, and when to choose it over REST.
In practice
One-off articles that put the ideas to work on a real problem.
Where REST APIs, webhooks and GraphQL turn up in an online shop, from the product page to the refund, with real platform examples and one order traced end to end.
Try it
Small working apps that show their working: every request and answer, as it happens.
A small weather app that shows its working: pick a place, see the request this page sends to a weather API, the data that comes back and how it becomes an icon.
A quick challenge for product managers: six product requests, one page of Stripe's API docs. Pick the endpoints each one needs, then see the calls in order and the outcome.
A small GraphQL app that shows its working: tick the facts you want about a country, see the query this page writes, the answer that comes back and how many requests REST would have needed.
A shop's back office that listens for webhooks: press an event, watch it arrive, then break it with retries, duplicates and a tampered payload to see what a good receiver does.