Beyond the Spinning Wheel: Building Robust and Resilient APIs

When faced with issues like "your API is not responding" or the dreaded "spinning wheel," troubleshooting can be daunting as the root causes often hide deep within your technology stack. From web server configurations and threading models to database pool management, error handling protocols, timeouts, and rate limiting mechanisms, the complexity can be overwhelming.
This presentation offers practical examples to show the path toward developing robust, reliable, and resilient APIs. We'll explore critical defensive programming patterns including strategic timeout implementation, circuit breaker design, intelligent rate limiting, and effective load shedding techniques. These approaches not only prevent common production issues but also address those hard-to-catch problems that resist conventional debugging and reproduction attempts.
Let’s together transform your approach from reactive debugging to proactive resilience engineering.
The key takeaways, should be:

1. Understand in depth common API problems in production
2. Learn more about the complex failure points, such as server configuration, threading models, database pool management, error handling, timeouts and rate limiting.
3. Promote shift from reactive debugging to proactive resilience engineering.
4. Practical approach to holistic resilience.