Designing APIs for humans: Object IDs

This reminds me of the debate whether part numbers should have a human readable prefix (category) or not. In the arguments in the above article match many of the arguments I’ve made for a prefix in part numbers. Semi-structured identifiers are a pragmatic solution.

Stripe is well known for having a very nice and well documented API.

I recently downloaded an auth token from Github, and it has a prefix:

ghp_J1mrUdihyO...

Makes a lot of sense – easy to identify what it is for, and easy to search/audit code for these.