Build APIs You Won't Hate: Everyone and their dog wants an API, so you should probably learn how to build them

Phil has seen a few trends come and go during a long and varied career of building stuff for money as an employee, freelancer, consultant and now CTO. One trend over recent years is the rise of APIs as an everyday part of the average server-side developers job. Back in 2009 Phil released a CodeIgniter Rest Server, wrote a few articles about how to use it and built handfuls of APIs for his freelance clients. This tool was fairly basic, but covered HTTP-based routing, HTTP Basic/Digest/API Key authentication, added logging and throttling and did not force CRUD-based conventions. The internet seemed to like it, and this code is still used by Apple, the UN and USA.gov. Later on as a core-contributor to FuelPHP he added this functionality to the core, and again built out a bunch of APIs for people. Then he got a job in NYC, to take over as Lead Engineer for a company that - you guessed it - had a FuelPHP API and wanted to improve it. After two years of working on their API, Phil has moved to Ride.com, building their API with an amazing team of developers. Phil has been building APIs for so long, he has come up with a very long list of ways to make them not suck, and he'd like to share the information with you all.