Thursday, January 30
a tentative personal manifesto for the web, part 1: APIs
I'm not sure when I first began to dimly apprehend this. I know I'd suffered enough with individual manifestations of the phenomenon to catch on years ago, but it's only recently that I've begun to integrate these experiences into a coherent generalization. So, ok, here it is:
Fuck your API.
There are two conversations I have pretty routinely. The one conversation is where somebody wants to integrate some third-party service with the software I write, and after I take a couple of good deep breaths and the red starts to leak back out of my vision, I say well, ok, do they at least have an API?
The other conversation goes like this:
Them: "Is there something wrong with [Thing]?"
Me: "Fuck."
Which is widely recognized shorthand for "I'll just be spending the rest of my day/week/month on the networked [Thing] API".
I think we've been sold a bill of goods.
[to be elaborated on]