While I have some development experience, I have yet to design APIs or larger scale projects.
My general process usually involves something along:
- Coming up with a few proposed designs.
- Enlist their pros and cons.
- Given a set of scenarios (X changes, new feature added, etc) — how does the design react to it.
This is my own “style”; I am wondering where can i read more about formal processes and methodologies for doing such things? (online, books, etc)
I like the book The Clean Coder, and Also Agile Principles, Patters, and Practices in C#, and lastly Clean Code all written by Robert C. Martin. I like the way he writes, I like his style of coding and it has given me tons to think about and apply to my own professional career as a programmer. You can get all those books for fairly cheap on Amazon. Also Robert C. Martin has his own website for this sort of stuff. http://www.objectmentor.com/omTeam/martin_r.html this is the website featuring him in the “About our team part.” poke around there and see if you can’t find his other website, and a program he wrote called Fitnesse.
Although your style looks good for normal sized projects that hobbyists tend to have on larger scales it may be a few more steps involved. What Online service were you thinking of writing for? I am currently writing another one for Zoho, but I keep forgetting to import my code from work into my program.