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Stripe CLI

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Re: Stripe CLI

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top APIs I've enjoyed working with: 1. Stripe (Best) 2. Twilio 3. Twitter (Does what it needs to do quickly) 4. Puppeteer (Amazing. Was super helpful.) 5. Google (mostly ok but could be better) APIs I've hated working with: 1. Paypal (the worst - docs are horrible and UI is not consistent with most of the help material out there because it changes all the time. Have you tried their support? That's a beauty) 2. Facebo…

The Twilio Dashboard _really_ needs a refresh. It's still in a world where every button is a complete page refresh. It's painfully slow to interact with.

I can live with the full page refresh, but my biggest pain point is working with sub accounts on trello. They store the sub account in a cookie instead of in the URL, so if I want to share what I'm looking at with a colleague it's a faff.

Re: Stripe CLI

#102
post #88
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add eBay to the second list. We are still uploading XML documents.

And Amazon sellers API (Amazon MWS). Rarely seen such an inconsistent mess of often poorly documented SOAP-ish calls, that so many external partners base their livelyhood on.

Some APIs you can choose to use. Other APIs you have to use. The ones you have to use tend to not care much about the developer experience... Because why should they? No one's going to avoid Amazon because their API was annoying. People need to make money.

This actually explains a lot of other things. Like the DMV.

Re: Stripe CLI

#103
post #59
post #49

In the Twilio world, I can do something like this, via the command line and their API: - activate new phone number - send SMS from that number - deactivate number I have not ever done that particular workflow , but I could. Who is the Twilio of payments/fintech wherein I could perform a workflow like this: - generate new CC number in my name - set transaction limit(s) and expiry 10 days from now - (go use that CC in…

How could you programmatically create a credit card without some pre-existing financial relationship with a a credit card issuer? There's a good reason you cannot simply create and destroy payment cards without any trusted third party keeping track. Money laundering is the obvious issue.

Well, you'd presumable have some pre-existing financial relationship, all the legal agreements and stuff; it's just that instead of (or inaddition to) having a "long-term" credit card number you'd cycle through a bunch of disposable short-term credit card numbers. I.e. your relationship with the card issuer is long-term but the instrument you use to interact with merchants is intentionally limited to a short term.

Re: Stripe CLI

#104
post #49

In the Twilio world, I can do something like this, via the command line and their API: - activate new phone number - send SMS from that number - deactivate number I have not ever done that particular workflow , but I could. Who is the Twilio of payments/fintech wherein I could perform a workflow like this: - generate new CC number in my name - set transaction limit(s) and expiry 10 days from now - (go use that CC in…

I'm not a customer, but I believe that Revolut offers something like this, though with some restrictions and I'm not sure if they extend this to USA - they have the concept of 'disposable virtual cards' https://www.revolut.com/help/getting-started/getting-a-card/... and an API for controlling stuff.

Re: Stripe CLI

#105
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top APIs I've enjoyed working with: 1. Stripe (Best) 2. Twilio 3. Twitter (Does what it needs to do quickly) 4. Puppeteer (Amazing. Was super helpful.) 5. Google (mostly ok but could be better) APIs I've hated working with: 1. Paypal (the worst - docs are horrible and UI is not consistent with most of the help material out there because it changes all the time. Have you tried their support? That's a beauty) 2. Facebo…

Add eBay to the second list. We are still uploading XML documents.

eBay is an absolute nightmare. They have a demo instance to test on and it's about 4 years out of date and half of it doesn't work anymore.

Re: Stripe CLI

#106
post #15

Stripe is by far the best developer experience I’ve had in my career working with third party APIs/services. The attention to detail is just second to none, and documentation is a big part of this.

Aside from documentation, how do you judge if an API is good?

= Design characteristics =

1. Simple, distinct concepts with unambiguous names.

2. Semantics are clear, following conventions as appropriate.

3. Minimize surface area without reducing functionality.

4. Clarity and specificity of ErrorCodes and messages.

= Operational characteristics =

1. Extremely low level of 500s.

2. Low call latencies.

3. The API does what it says it does.

4. Consistency is (nearly) always within its documented SLA.

5. Do not make backwards incompatible changes.

= Social characteristics =

1. Docs are correct, up-to-date, complete, specific, and unambiguous.

2. Clearly communicate service outages and resolution timelines.

3. Seek feedback on evolving the APIs.

Re: Stripe CLI

#107
post #15

Stripe is by far the best developer experience I’ve had in my career working with third party APIs/services. The attention to detail is just second to none, and documentation is a big part of this.

Top APIs I've enjoyed working with: 1. Stripe (Best) 2. Twilio 3. Twitter (Does what it needs to do quickly) 4. Puppeteer (Amazing. Was super helpful.) 5. Google (mostly ok but could be better) APIs I've hated working with: 1. Paypal (the worst - docs are horrible and UI is not consistent with most of the help material out there because it changes all the time. Have you tried their support? That's a beauty) 2. Facebo…

I was shocked at how bad the documentation for Facebook was. I assumed wiring up login would be super simple, it’s amazing how hard it was to find in their documentation. I guess when you’re paying devs to implant a shitty custom currency you can’t invest in docs for one of your biggest integrations.

Re: Stripe CLI

#108
post #15

Stripe is by far the best developer experience I’ve had in my career working with third party APIs/services. The attention to detail is just second to none, and documentation is a big part of this.

Top APIs I've enjoyed working with: 1. Stripe (Best) 2. Twilio 3. Twitter (Does what it needs to do quickly) 4. Puppeteer (Amazing. Was super helpful.) 5. Google (mostly ok but could be better) APIs I've hated working with: 1. Paypal (the worst - docs are horrible and UI is not consistent with most of the help material out there because it changes all the time. Have you tried their support? That's a beauty) 2. Facebo…

Github api. honorable mention.

Re: Stripe CLI

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top APIs I've enjoyed working with: 1. Stripe (Best) 2. Twilio 3. Twitter (Does what it needs to do quickly) 4. Puppeteer (Amazing. Was super helpful.) 5. Google (mostly ok but could be better) APIs I've hated working with: 1. Paypal (the worst - docs are horrible and UI is not consistent with most of the help material out there because it changes all the time. Have you tried their support? That's a beauty) 2. Facebo…

I was shocked at how bad the documentation for Facebook was. I assumed wiring up login would be super simple, it’s amazing how hard it was to find in their documentation. I guess when you’re paying devs to implant a shitty custom currency you can’t invest in docs for one of your biggest integrations.

Alternate reason: you'll figure it out anyway, because it's one of their biggest integrations. It doesn't matter how hard it is if your users and your business wants it.

They have no incentive to improve their docs. They're Facebook, there's no competition at all.

Re: Stripe CLI

#110
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! We still have a lot of work to do. (Making our integration experience simpler -- now that Stripe's functionality has grown so much -- is an area of current focus. If any HN readers happen to have specific suggestions on this front, feel free to email sebas@stripe.com.)

I love the backwards compatibility that Stripe provides. Thank you so much! We launched a SaaS product on the 2016-03 API version. Since then[1] the API has basically changed completely around subscriptions (even the top-level objects aren't called the same anymore), to the point it would probably be easiest to just start a rewrite from scratch (which probably would take a week or two). But the fact that the old API…

They had a great blog post on how they manage API versioning a couple years ago: https://stripe.com/blog/api-versioning
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