If you build or maintain APIs, you already know that HTTP status codes either make your life easier or quietly sabotage every integration. This guide focuses on **real examples of best practices for HTTP status codes in APIs**, not theory for theory’s sake. We’ll walk through how modern teams actually use 2xx, 3xx, 4xx, and 5xx codes, and why consistent choices matter for observability, client SDKs, and long‑term maintenance. You’ll see examples of how Stripe, GitHub, and other public APIs structure their responses, and how to avoid the vague `200 OK` for everything anti‑pattern. Along the way, we’ll look at examples of best practices for HTTP status codes in APIs that cover validation errors, rate limiting, pagination, idempotency, and more. By the end, you’ll have a practical playbook you can drop into your API guidelines, plus patterns that align with modern HTTP standards and the direction of the broader web ecosystem.
If you build or maintain APIs, you’ve probably learned the hard way that pagination is where performance, usability, and correctness all collide. Instead of yet another abstract theory piece, this guide walks through real-world examples of best practices for pagination in APIs, showing what actually works in production. We’ll look at how teams at companies like GitHub, Stripe, and Twitter design their pagination, why cursor-based approaches are beating old-school page/limit patterns, and how to avoid the classic footguns that break clients. You’ll see examples of offset pagination, cursor pagination, keyset pagination, and hybrid designs, along with concrete request and response patterns you can adapt. We’ll also cover how to document pagination clearly, how to keep it stable across versions, and how to test it under load. By the end, you’ll have a set of practical, battle-tested patterns and examples of best practices for pagination in APIs that you can apply to REST, GraphQL, or even gRPC-backed systems.
When teams start looking for examples of top 3 examples of authentication methods for APIs, the conversation usually gets muddled fast: OAuth? API keys? JWTs? mTLS? The truth is, there’s no single silver bullet. The best examples of API authentication in 2024–2025 are layered, pragmatic, and shaped by real security incidents and compliance pressure. This guide walks through the top 3 authentication methods that actually get used in production APIs today, with real examples from major platforms and clear guidance on when to use each. You’ll see how a simple API key can still be the right call for internal services, where OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect shine for user-facing apps, and why signed tokens like JWTs dominate stateless microservice architectures. Along the way, we’ll contrast these examples of authentication strategies, highlight common mistakes, and show how to combine them into a security model that’s strong without becoming a maintenance nightmare.