0. Communicating for Shared Understanding between Humans and Systems (APIs)

Communication is the foundation of software engineering. It’s what allows groups of people with different roles, expertise, and perspectives to come together to achieve something bigger than any one person could accomplish alone. Whether it’s a product manager explaining a feature request to an engineering team, designers aligning with software engineers to bring a vision to life, or site reliability engineers ensuring seamless deployments, every step of the software development life cycle (SDLC) relies on effective communication.

This same principle applies to software systems. APIs—Application Programming Interfaces—are the tools that enable different pieces of software to exchange information, coordinate actions, and work together. Just as humans need structured communication to succeed in a project, systems need structured interfaces to achieve interoperability.

In this sequence of readings, we’ll explore how communication—both among humans and between systems—is the key to creating shared understanding. We’ll emphasize that learning to communicate effectively in both domains is a skill that will not only make you a better software engineer but also prepare you for success in any career.

• Part 1 - Communication in the Software Development Lifecycle
• Part 2 - A Brief History of Communication between Computing Systems
• Part 3 - High-level API Concerns
• Part 4 - Introducing HTTP and REST APIs