Versioning and Evolution: Changing an API Without Breaking Its Consumers
The real skill isn't cutting a v2 — it's knowing which changes are safe to ship silently, which ones break clients you'll never meet, and how to retire an old version responsibly instead of forever.
Changing an API without breaking consumers: what counts as breaking, versioning strategies and their trade-offs (URI vs header vs additive evolution), the robustness principle and its limits, and responsible deprecation with Sunset headers and usage telemetry.