In this meeting, the State Changers discussed a web development project involving a system to generate and manage athlete information. One State Changer described their progress with Xano for the creation of this system and their plans to present it to engineers for backend integration. The team also talked about their current tool, Retool, expressing dissatisfaction and indicating a potential desire to shift fully to Xano.
The main focus of the conversation, however, was the best practices for building functions and APIs. The participant sought clarification on whether they should build APIs or functions first, especially since their project involved a lot of nested APIs. The consensus was that it was generally okay to build functions first, citing separation of concerns, easiness in testing and editing, and a more sophisticated and reasonable approach for technologists. However, they also recognized circumstances where chaining APIs may be necessary. In instances where a process needs to be parallelized or when the endpoint is crashing due to memory issues, it could be more appropriate to have an endpoint call another endpoint. The conversation also included some feedback on Xano's user interface. While the team appreciated Xano's backend strength, they criticized its lack of organization tools for functions, advocating for a folder system similar to the one for APIs. Despite acknowledging some of the frontend design shortcomings, they recognized Xano's continuous improvements.
(Source: Office Hours 11/7 )
