I am writing today in the hopes of getting the community’s feedback on whether I’m crazy or not, and hopefully we will even affect the way Asana manages their API.
When you(Asana) make updates to the API, even when tiny updates, it somehow always causes problems in our company’s day-to-day. Frankly, it also hurts the morale of our small development team to continuously have to update our code. For example, today, all of our scripts that connect to the Asana API stopped working. To fix our errors, I found out that I now had to replace “id” with “gid”. Thats ALL I had to do. While a quick fix, it is absurd that this happened in the first place.
It is very important that I have an understanding and empathy for why you keep making changes to the API like this. I have some questions, please kindly review them:
- Why dont you have an API system that has versions, and allows us to upgrade versions on our own time?
- Should I assume, every time you make an update that causes an error in my code, its because you have a huge security flaw that you had to fix? If it isnt security related, why make the change at all knowing that many companies will have to rewrite their scripts?
- Why did you feel the need to drop “id” from the API response on project info and task info? I understand it was a duplicate of “gid”, but is that really the only reason?
I am honestly beyond frustrated, because we run a small company and I’m literally tired of being called out of meetings to fix errors like this. I am not an expert developer. But I have seen competitors, well funded with teams of developers just like you, manage API systems in a much easier way for me. They create API versions, and allow us to upgrade the API version on our own time, with an understanding that teams around the globe depend on STABILITY in their API calls.
Despite my anger and frustration, and the fact that we are a tiny subscriber to you money-wise, please read this message with open eyes and seriously consider the position we are in as a 2-man development team.
Thank you for reading.
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