Summary

In this chapter, we learned the importance of Donald Norman’s action cycle as a way to think about how we model our own APIs, and we introduced our own API action cycle called the RPW Loop.

We then applied our understanding of this common interaction cycle to model our own Onboarding API cycle. We did this in two main steps. First, we mapped out the API workflow in a simple diagram to help us see the big picture. Second, we talked to people at BigCo Inc., gathered up their handwritten forms, and created our internal cycle (IC) documents that we’ll use later when we need to actually design and build our Onboarding API.

We also learned how to use the npm command-line utility as a project management tool. We learned how to create our package.json control document, how to install other packages, and how to modify configuration settings. Finally, we modified our Git settings to ignore some files and folders managed by npm and then used Git to update our local files and send those changes to our remote GitHub repository for later use.