## The Implication of Hyrum's Law on Hypermedia APIs #### by Ben Greenberg

_With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody._ -- Hyrum's Law

## And it's true * Clients crashing on changes to templated URI. * Clients parsing identifiers out of links. * Clients crashing when a relation is removed.

## Carrots * Use well-defined, existing hypermedia schema. * Libraries and tools * Socialize the benefits of hypermedia and loose coupling. * Regularly exercise loose coupling in design.

## Sticks * Change URL paths frequently. * Chaos engineering for hypermedia?