Building a diagnostic API platform engineers could extend

Context and problem

Hardware engineers needed a practical way to diagnose and control accelerator cards remotely. The available options were direct SSH access or provisioning requests: one was difficult to standardize, the other was slow, inflexible, and offered limited inputs and results.

Responsibility and constraints

I designed and evolved the framework from its initial implementation through its API contract, endpoint model, test strategy, documentation, and developer workflow. I worked with hardware and software engineers to make the system useful for people who needed to add and operate endpoints without deciphering a growing collection of one-off scripts.

Long-running hardware actions needed an API contract that could report progress and results reliably.
New server generations created a continuing need for diagnostic and control capabilities.
The framework had to be approachable for engineers with different levels of software experience.

Approach and technical decisions

After early feedback exposed a slow and underdocumented first version, I reworked the contract around an asynchronous PUT and GET fork-and-poll model. I introduced config-based endpoint definitions, integration tests, command-line utilities, and endpoint documentation. The configuration became both implementation input and living documentation, which made endpoint behavior easier to review, extend, and test.

What changed

The framework grew to support more than 100 diagnostic, testing, and control endpoints across accelerator hardware platforms. It improved test development speed by 30% and hardware diagnostic speed by more than 55%, while giving engineers a more consistent way to add and use hardware operations.

What this demonstrates

Demonstrates platform ownership from API design through developer experience, with an emphasis on using feedback and tests to make a shared system easier to trust and extend.