I see you joining the bands of "serverless" computing - this is no easy feat - can you speak to what is in your backend and how you plan to support heavy workloads?
It shouldn't be an issue - the API currently sits on Google's Cloud Platform which provides the infrastructure and tools to scale the service. IMO Snapchat's usage of the platform really speaks to the stability and capability of it.
If I am going to trust you my API I want to know that you have top notch SLAs on your service, and since I am providing the code you are going to want to monitor the heck out of it so that you know that in case of failure whose fault it is.
Understood, we will work on finding that info and surfacing it on the site. As far as monitoring and errors go, the program is actually hosted by us in this case. So unless the program is faulty in some way any response issue is probably our fault.
Does that count as an SDK? - simple code generation out of a spec? - Most SDKs exist because the provider is hiding some ugly code or making a number of primitive API calls to assemble the response. Aren't we falling back into the old "software" practices and now have to maintain code for anyone that users our service? - wasn't it supposed to be a service?
A lot of big companies publish what they call an SDK, which is really just a thin, idiomatic wrapper on top of HTTP calls. Most of the AWS SDKs are like this, and sometimes the wrapper is way too thin (see: the disastrous mess that is the Dynamo JS library).
Should SDK mean more than that? I don't know. Is that kind of SDK useful? Definitely! HTTP is untyped, slow, and potentially tricky to use (like with OAuth 1.2), so it's nice to have some native code that abstracts that stuff away.
As an API provider, would indexing and discovery of your APIs be of value to you?
As a developer with discovery may enable synthesis and composition of APIs.
Sites like ProgrammableWeb (http://www.programmableweb.com) and API Harmony (http://apiharmony-open.mybluemix.net) would do better if they could understand what changed and what is available.
I lead the API Harmony team at IBM Research and this information would be extremely valuable.
Like any data service, it will be as good as its data - without a big concerted effort to gather data it will soon die.
You need to reach out to science fairs, big and small, as well as Science Research programs and convince them to post their work here. Also in lieu of citations awards earned would help distinguish the more decent ones. Downloads may also be a good metric to measure interest
For external purposes - use stackoverflow
For internal purposes - you may need to deploy your own - phpBB used to be popular a few years back https://www.phpbb.com/
