I came across a post on LinkedIn from Alex Akimov, the CTO of Monite, sharing their strategy for versioning their API. I knew that I wanted to get Stanislav Zmiev, the Tech Lead of Platform Engineering at Monite, and the person behind their API versioning on the show. Versioning is an important and hot topic, and Stanislav delivered with a very wise, pragmatic, and fortunate for all of us, an open-source solution to managing change across our APIs.
Stanislav knows his stuff when it comes to versioning, and it shows in their open-source implementation called Cadwyn, which as they say, is a “Production-ready community-driven modern Stripe-like API versioning in FastAPI”. Stanislav shared both the business and technical reasons behind when you want to version or not version, and provides us all with a very pragmatic view of API versioning, which is often a heated and confusing topic. Well, I’ll let you listen for yourself…
I am going to dig into Cadwyn and learn more. I want to learn more about the technical approach they use as part of FastAPI, but I also want to understand the philosophical approach he emulated from Stripe. I like the way he dismissed me asking if Stripe was a standard, and focused on the importance of hitching his approach to Stripe’s wagon from a storytelling perspective. People know Stripe. Stripe is successful. Thus, let’s use their approach to versioning. It might not be what you need in all cases, but it provides a damn good starting point.
As we closed, Stanislav touched on another point I like—the importance of these API conversations. It wasn’t the usual technical puzzle challenge answer I’d expect to hear from a technologist, and it represents what we need more of in space. Talking to each other. Which is why I am doing these API Evangelist conversations. Thanks again Stanislav for joining me today to talk about versioning. Make sure and head over to check out what Monite offers when it comes to invoicing and bill pay, and I will do some digging into Cadwyn, as well as the Monite API, and see what I can’t cook up for future conversations and stories.
