Why Your API Should Use Conditional Requests for Caching

Episode notes

Episode 114 of The Developer Tools Podcast digs into conditional HTTP requests - the If-None-Match and If-Modified-Since headers that let APIs save bandwidth and reduce latency. Lucas and Luna walk through a real case: a mobile engineering team at a mid-size logistics startup that cut API response sizes by 60 percent just by adding ETags to their shipment-tracking endpoints. They explain the 304 Not Modified flow, how ETags differ from Last-Modified dates, and why weak ETags matter for load-balanced deployments. The hosts also discuss common gotchas: stale ETags behind CDNs, the cost of generating strong ETags on large payloads, and when conditional requests backfire on frequently mutated resources. No fluff, just concrete patterns for any team building REST or GraphQL APIs. #ConditionalRequests #HTTPCaching #ETags #APIDesign #WebPerformance #RESTAPI #GraphQL #DeveloperTools #LatencyOptimization #BandwidthSavings #HTTP304 #LastModified #CacheValidation #APIOptimization #BackendEngineering #Infrastructure #Technology #FexingoBusiness Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo

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